Opticnoodle: the MA blog

Moving on...

2008-10-09T03:44:00.001-07:00

New, post-MA blog is up and running on my website. Check it out! Add it to your RSS feed. Contribute your thoughts or links that you think I'd be interested in. I would love it to be a place to continue creative, collaborative debate and idea sharing.

That's where I'll be posting from here on out.

Medialab Prado.

2008-09-29T11:38:00.000-07:00

AVlab at Medialab Prado has been an amazing experience. I, too, feel the need to migrate my blog to a new one for my post-graduate art practice; so I will post a proper review of the experience on that when I return to London next week. A notice here will also be posted, but it will be embedded in my regular website

In the meantime, my post-MA performance life begins! at the wrap-up party for the lab. Will be fun to see what my work is like in a nightclub with typical set up of 1 projector, darkness and big (ish?) sound.

Here's the info in case any of you find yourselves in madrid:

October 1 / 11pm / @ Tempo Club
TRANS-AVLAB EXPRESS
AVLAB 1.0's last sonic stop. Live sound, experimental and audiovisual performances by artists of the workshop: Olaconmuchospeces aka Diego Javier Alberti / Sotaques (VJ Xorume + DJ/MC Gérson De Veras) / Servando Barreiro / Noish ~ aka Oskar / James Webb / Groundrush aka Simon Dell / Hans Christoph Steiner / Raúl Bri Díaz Pobrete / Tom Tlalim / Josecarlos Flores / Lena Schniewind / Jaime Lobato / Alberto Cerro / Roberto Moreno Maya / DJ Hidráulico.
@ Tempo Club (Duque de Osuna, 8. Plaza de España Metro Station). Free admission.

Everything, all at once now.

2008-08-23T04:08:00.000-07:00

The next month is going to be insanely busy, but I'm looking forward to it. As I wrap up my MA, the first steps into the next phase have already fallen into place. And of course, are overlapping! I'm on a roll. Just a matter of keeping the momentum up through the next couple of weeks.

I did manage to do 2 runthroughs of my show yesterday, the last one with an audience member who hadn't seen my work before! Both runthroughs felt really solid and my audience member was interested in what was going on. I'm happy to have gotten the show to this point since I've got things that are future looking happening this coming week.

Here's a brief overview of what the end of August and beginning of September hold for me:

- do my final show at Wimbledon College of Art!
Will post my performance schedule here in a separate entry this weekend.

- fly to Vienna to interview Pamela Z
Lucy pointed me to her work early on in the course, I blogged about it here. Very excited to see her live and get a chance to talk with her about her work and the themes and common interests we might (or might not) share.

- Movement for Dorks at Burning Dork
I'm running a workshop with the dorkbots where I get to test out my strategies for getting tech-based artists out from behind their gear. This will be a prototype of workshops I'd like to lead in the future and I'm really curious to see how it goes! I think it'll be fun. The dorkbot crew have been an amazing community for me here in London. Don't think I've blogged about them here before. Will try and do an entry in the future when I have more time. Oh, and yes, to add to the ridiculousness: the camp is being held in DORKING. naturally. ;)

- AV Lab 1.0, Medialab Prado, Madrid
I will be heading to this workshop in Madrid for the last two weeks of September. Get to collaborate with a bunch of interesting sounding A/V artists from all over the world. Great opportunity to start finding a broader community doing similar work to me and also a great chance to finally get to Madrid!

OK, back to this weekend's activity: assembling/finalizing documentation!

21 August runthrough

2008-08-22T00:26:00.001-07:00

Managed to do a full run through yesterday without crashing Isadora.

I spent the morning organizing some final bits of tech and writing my notes from Tuesday into an actual score sheet that I could reference during the run. The score has ended up being 6 sections with a reprise of the second one towards the end. I don't have the sheet with me here at home, so will have to wait to post it later.

The runthrough felt spotty but overall I think the score is going to work. Most of the sections run between 10-15 minutes, which is perfect timing for the 90 minutes I have allocated as "performance" times over the weekend. The run yesterday ran about 70 minutes including some hiccups.

Watching the video recordings of the performance continues to be really helpful for me to get perspective on what I'm doing. I will tend to fixate on the parts that weren't working and extrapolate that to the whole performance "not working". Reviewing video shows me that I was right about the parts that I thought weren't working, but also shows me all the parts that are working.

Plan for today: I'd really like to try and run through it TWICE. Will be exhausting but interesting.

Plan for weekend: Get documentation to at least 75% completion. I'm feeling the time crunch and know that this is the last serious chunk of time I have to concentrate on it while I'm locked out of rehearsal space for the bank holiday weekend.

Last week wrap up.

2008-08-21T01:11:00.000-07:00

Finally got a chance to upload 2 more batches of videos from last week. The week ended with final tech setup and trying to work out what to do with two projectors. Having two dramatically changes the dynamic in the room, in a way that I like and want to work with.

Big thing that I noticed yesterday is that I feel there is now an even bigger "Stage" area to the room. I will be breaking that wall with my own movement, but I can't gauge how audiences will respond until I have an audience. The only thing I know from past experience is that most people respond to projectors by ducking out of the way of them or avoiding them altogether. This would cut off about half of the space once both projection areas are revealed and leave everyone squished into one corner. I'll probably end up being more explicit when I invite people to move as they wish around the space and tell them they can walk in front of the projector beams.

I haven't had many visitors to my space, so I'll do my best to anticipate and plan for it and then make adjustments once I have people in the space with me. That all said, time has not been wasted! The time alone(ish) in my space has allowed me to rehearse and rehearse and rehearse.
Which one needs to do as a performer! This week I have begun working up to a full run of the "performance" section of my work, which I have scheduled to be an hour and a half. So far I've made it to 40 minutes. The thing that seems to be ending the run throughs is that I crash the program! This only happens when I try to record something on a track that is already playing. An easy mistake, especially when you're in the throes of performing, but I hope that the continued rehearsals over the next 7 days *gulp* will smooth this out as I become more comfortable with the final structure of the show and the technology setup in its final configuration. And it'll happen during the shows. I have no doubt of that! I'll take it in stride. It's Isadora telling me that she's done with that performance. :)

So finally, the clips I uploaded yesterday are going to be the final video clips as the run throughs are getting too long to easily review, digitize and publish to the internet. I've got a bunch of other things I need to be pulling together for the final assessment outside of rehearsal time which take precedence over video clips. Will still update progress here on the blog though.

Here are some clips that contain my favorite pieces from the recent uploads. In both of them, I noticed that I interacted directly with the TVs that I have dotted around the space. I haven't been prone to do that much, thinking that they're mainly there for the audience to play with. But of course, I can use them too and really should do.

This second one starts off a little rough (with wacky iMovie jump cuts...), but I like how the video inspires the sound and how I was able to connect the recorded and live actions through echoing and complementary sound and movement.

Second half to above video:

Flipping, finalizing tech.

2008-08-15T04:20:00.000-07:00

I have 3 new videos to upload to YouTube, but they take so long! Will try and post them soon.

Recap of what they illustrate from the last days work:

I've been fleshing out the 3 core phases of the score I developed. On Wednesday, while waiting for final approval of my tech setup, I started to think about how I might use the second projector. I ended up flipping the image horizontally and worked with reflections of simple movements. I think this works quite nicely. Not convinced that it will always be this way.

I then continued to practice building up sections using the three pieces in the score. I was happy with the progression that came out of it:
- simple movement with arm and feet captured on video
- sound sample of my feet stepping on the floor as base for sound, layered with residual sounds from the previous day's work
- live mirroring if movement on video, in front of the video screen, and then also moving through the space
- capture of a new video of my face in which I open my mouth really wide!
- this new video encouraging vocalization to complement it, live wandering around the space
- I then recorded a variation on the vocalization and looped that
- it didn't line up with the video track at all! This is fine by me.
- Then finally, live movement that related to either sound or visual cues, but couldn't possibly link to both since sound and video were asynchronous.

Videos to follow early next week. This post clearly more notes for me than a clear sharing for others!

Yesterday, we got our final tech allocation. I set up all 3 monitors for the first time and am happy with the way they mark the space in a subtle way. I don't think I've mentioned this before, but I see the TV monitors as my "audience" in a very traditional way. They are all placed on chairs and are watching the events unfold in the passive way that an audience often does, and that a TV has no choice but to do. A friend visiting from the USA came by the studio and I was pleased to see him looking at the performance live, in relation to the video projection, AND through the 3 monitors. It reminded me of a goal I had for my audience: even though they are being filmed from different angles, I want the overall feeling to be one where they are free to move around and experience the performance in a way that is comfortable to them. I don't want to give them a prescription for how they can interact with the work (aside from obviously keeping them from wrecking the equipment.)

Jera also stopped in briefly and helped me make a simple statement. She said that video work is so often about the image, and I said that my performance was about foregrounding the body that created the image.

And today: wrestling with a signal splitter to see if I can get the two projectors running off my computer. and hopefully enough time to do another runthrough.

Settling the score, part 1.

2008-08-12T13:35:00.000-07:00

Lots of videos posted to YouTube, only highlighting some here.

Ambient sounds and images when you're the only one in the room turned out to be quite fun. The door to my studio space has a sweet little jingle bell to it when it shuts, so I started walking in and out of the room and recorded the sound. I built up a soundtrack from this, often leaving the previous track running so that it bled into the next track and created quite a nice muddle as the tracks were layered further and further. The video ended up being signature "lena" I think. I am able to get 3 layers (2 recorded, 1 live) of me walking in and out of the door with decent quality when you are actually in the space. The poor quality of web based video means that you probably won't be able to make out the second recorded layer.

Here's a video clip from today which I think shows a good cross section of process and how it might all fit together. It's quite slow, but the camera was right next to one of the speakers, so the sound is fairly decent.

From watching these, I know that I need to spend more time repeating the action and figure out other ways or positions from which to watch the piece of video I have just created. Too much hovering near the laptop!

Interstitials and sound clips.

2008-08-12T13:29:00.000-07:00

I created some interesting compositions while accidentally overlapping videos. I thought they might work nicely as stand alone loops which can play when I need a break or am not in the space. Something like that.

The first clip was created last week on a day when I had given my keys to my brother for the day and couldn't get to any cameras! I learned how to export directly from Isadora, which is a useful thing if I decide to use these interstitials.

I also learned that I can record audio in quicktime but I don't seem to be able to play them except in my iTunes. So! Hopefully I will sort this out soon and post them here.

A Score to Settle

2008-08-12T13:28:00.000-07:00

Last week ended with me having a clearer idea of a skeleton score to work from. After my experiments, I came up with a progression that I am fleshing out this week. There are 3 sections to it. Here are the notes from last week. Following entries will go into more detail about how this has been manifesting itself in subsequent rehearsals.

1) ambient sounds and images - capturing natural sounds (people talking, feet shuffling) and observational video (people walking around the room from a wide angle, possibly close ups as well)

2) sounds from a body part (snap, clap, percussive mouth noise) video of the same part then shadow play on the projection with the same body part

3) more distinct singing harmonies, shadow play into projections onto skin, use of palindrome movement in the video, free movement and harmonizing live in the space

Website updated.

2008-08-06T04:40:00.000-07:00

Oh! And my new home page is up and running!
The whole site should be up next week.

yesterday, today, tomorrow

2008-08-06T04:17:00.000-07:00

This week is about running performance modes to determine elements for a score that I can work from over the coming weeks and probably into the performance itself.

yesterday was experimenting with types of projections onto my body to see which ones might work easily and effectively in an improvised performance. clips of interesting ones here. This clip is also scattered with another random echoing which I can get to 3 layers (2 video and 1 live) when it's dark and stormy outside! otherwise it's too bright in the studio.

Today I'm going to try and run at least a 1 hour long performance.

Tomorrow I will be adding a second projector and third monitor.

I like to watch.

2008-08-05T02:23:00.000-07:00

Short clip from yesterday's rehearsal. Contentwise it doesn't look much different from other stuff I've been doing, but some important revelations or points of clarification came out of yesterday's rehearsal.

At the moment, I am my audience. I'm setting up a space where I can watch people and build a composition out of their sounds and movements. Judging from the feedback I've received so far, this isn't totally alienating my whole audience, but more to this point about me being my own audience: I've created a structure that I'm fascinated with. This is a step that I think all performers must go through at some point and I don't necessarily think it's a bad thing to be your own audience. Why on earth would you be creating something that you weren't interested in? The danger is when there is little or nothing for other people to get from it. I must be doubly vigilant about this because of my past as a camera person. I love observing people and recording what I observe so that other people can see what I see. So it seems only natural to me that I've created a performance space where I can observe and react to what I've observed. I like to watch. I think most people do, and I seem to be trying to create a setup where I can continue to watch; and I hope it is also a space where a good chunk of my audience is also enjoying watching and walks away satisfied with their experience. I know I can't please everyone. Perhaps I also need to be careful of this assumption and try harder to please more people. Interesting challenge....

Getting bogged down into thoughts, need to jot down some other notes and get on with the practical stuff:
- explore projection onto body parts. requires some intentionality. How to do this on the fly? Try some different strategies.
- workshop vs open studio vs performance: what would a workshop with audience members look like? what are people's expectations of coming to an open studio vs a workshop? What would I do with people in an open studio vs. workshop?
- establish the level of "road map" that I'm going to give me audience. What needs to be communicated to an audience to give them enough structure to get something out of the performance but still allow them freedom to approach the performance on their own terms (or at least feel that they have)?

Time alone in the studio is when I work on becoming comfortable with the setup I have and working out technological issues. I can't really figure out the issues related to my audience without them in the space. I hope people come to the Tues-Thurs afternoon sessions.

Anna Parkina performance.

2008-07-30T06:20:00.000-07:00

I went to the Wilkinson Gallery last night to see an intermedia performance by artists Anna Parkina. Need to check out what other people are doing in my interdiscipline.

At any rate, I wasn't in love with the performance, but it was worthwhile to put a couple of things in perspective about my own practice.

The performance involved a video projection, a cello player, some ambient crowd/commuter train sound, and Parkina doing what can only be described as "interpretive dance" in the most gaudy and stereotypical sense. (please note that I'm not saying this to be catty, judging from the playfulness of her other work that I glimpsed, she'd probably agree.) The video was a mirror image of itself where figures would pop out of the seem between the two images and make an interesting shape. There were times when either her live body or her shadow (or both) were beautifully complementing the form that the recorded mirror bodies were creating. I felt that could have been the whole piece right there.

I saw in her performance, that while she clearly has done work in video before, she's still struggling with the big challenge of working across disciplines: you get kinda overwhelmed with all the cool stuff that's at your fingertips and it's really really hard to edit it down into a cohesive whole. And even when you think you have, it's still too much.

The question this raises, which I think I'm trying to address is: Is it interesting to watch the chaos of too many parts not working together for those rare glimpses when it does come together? I clearly think that the answer is yes for my own work, but am I that patient with other people's work? Mmmmm. not really.

This is really telling! I'm glad that I'm proud of my work and want to embrace the quirks and uncomfortable moments and I do love work that takes the quiet little pops and fizzles that are all around us and make something beautiful out of it. I guess maybe the difference is that I don't always feel that's what other artists are trying to do with their work, that they are trying to present a polished piece when they haven't yet harnessed all the nuances of the different media they're trying to throw together into one piece. It's really a tall order. Maybe I'd like it better if I thought it was really trying to embrace the chaos?

The performance also confirmed for me that it's important that people that come to my show are able to come and go as they please. I felt soooo trapped at this performance last night and I wanted to act out, which is very unlike me. I think it's because I'm so close to this type of work right now with the final show only a month away. I don't care that not everyone wants to stick around my work for a long time, I certainly stay with some pieces longer than others. However, I've also had people note both during my scratch performances and the Nunnery show that they wanted to sit with the piece for a while. I'm happy to have people come to my work on their own terms and not put a finite time limit on something that seems to want to continue to evolve longer than a 20-45 minutes time slot.

Notes on scratch 2.

2008-07-30T04:08:00.000-07:00

A little belatedly, here are my thoughts on Scratch Performance 2.Having trouble uploading videos to YouTube. I've managed to get 3 of the 4 up there!

Click here to view the videos. I've included small descriptions of what's happening in each section. Feel free to comment here or there if you have questions.

So recapping the performance:
- the call and response strategy worked well once I got the technological glitches sorted out.
- the technology setup continues to be good. I really like how the space changes depending on what is happening. For example, people were quite free with their movements around the space until the projector turned on. That shifted things completely.
- My sense from the audience is that I am tapping in better to the vibe in the room. They'd mostly gotten over the novelty of goofing off for the cameras on the televisions and were ready to sit back and watch when I started singing and recording video.
- I think I like to move away from the hypertheatrical screaming mouth.
- It seems like the little explanation, with some work, is a helpful point of entry for audience members into the performance.

What next:
The big thing: I realize I can't develop this in a solitary vacuum. I'll be sending out an invitation to MA students and other artists around London to come visit me in the studio Mon-Thurs afternoons throughout August. I plan to have a more casual, open studio approach to Mon-Wed and then push it over into more traditional "performance mode" on Thursdays. I think this model will continue to allow me to have some alone time to flesh out ideas and work on technology issues, and continue to help me figure out the right pitch and how I interact with visitors.

What needs work:
- play with having 4 monitors so that there is full coverage of the room
- I would like to try having the monitors play back pre-recorded material at times too. My idea at the moment is for that to be edited pieces from previous days' performances
- sort out the sound. I'm not quite sure how to get the immersive sound system going and how that will get hooked into the Isadora setup on my computer. Tech consultation is imminent.
- continue to experiment with different shifts in tone and how audience members shift their activity in the space
- try adding another projector (figure out how to control it from same computer) is it also capturing video or is it playing back pre-recorded stuff? Interesting prospect of expanding temporal dimension back into the less recent past in the space.
- I'm going to experiment with inviting people to stay after the performance and do more of a hands on "workshop" with them. I have a feeling this will be met with resistance, but might be another natural and nice extension of the performer/audience dynamic

Hm. there's probably more to be added, but I feel a more pressing need to get SOMETHING about Scratch 2 up on the blog!

Low tech saves high tech.

2008-07-09T12:23:00.000-07:00

today was that day when you feel like things are going really well and you are then fed a huge lump of humble pie. As your computer keeps crashing. over. and over. and over.

I figured it all out, and as much as I say I'm about exposing my process here, I doubt that you really want to hear me discussing the maddening nature of debugging sound and video capture optimization in Isadora. However, if you're geek like that and would like to know my beginner's woes, please leave a comment and I will happily go into more details.

As it is, I will say that the solution became apparent when I got home. And it involved masking tape.

See many of you for the scratch tomorrow.

Notes on scratch 1.

2008-07-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

Overall I was really happy with how last week went. I think that the scratch performance went off very closely to how I had imagined it would and that I now have a good foundation on which to build the final performance. Things will be tweaked and tested from here, but at this point I don't feel like I need to throw any of it away. In fact, I want to be systematic about this and keep what I have until I am certain that I've tested its possibilities and decided it shouldn't be there.

Things I was happy with:

the space. Primarily, I love the acoustics in the space and the sound of the kids playing at the school next door. I also just felt really focused and able to work in there.
the setup. I think will stick with the technology setup. It gave me alot to work with without being overwhelming.
the foundation setup in Isadora. It did exactly what I wanted it to do.
interacting with the video projection. I think the projection gave both me and the audience a point of entry into the performance, but didn't completely submerge the other things going on in the space once the performance had been running for a couple of minutes.
inviting the audience to get up and move around during the performance. I've been struggling with how much to guide an audience since the Nunnery. I was really resistant to giving any instructions on how to approach my work relying on people's natural sense of curiosity to kick in. However, research in the last couple of weeks has highlighted for me that people will look for clues on how to interact with the space/performance they find themselves in and that the placement of equipment and other people in the room are the biggest factors in determining how members of an audience will position themselves. To combat this, I need to speak up and invite them to move around. The people who did were glad they did. I was also glad that I had told them because everyone determined where they were going to position themselves based on who was already there.
placing my rig and myself in the center of the space. This may have seemed subtle to most, if not everyone there on Friday, but it's critical to my practice right now. In most situations where an artist is manipulation video, they are BEHIND the audience, almost completely hidden, or shoved to one side so that people have a clear view of the screen. My body, however passively hunched over my computer is right there in the middle.
projecting straight onto a wall in a lit space. Related to the point above. While still a focal point of the performance, I think this projection strategy breaks the absolute authority of the projected image. Going to review discussion from Friday and post some elaboration on this.

Things to work on/Next steps:

Call and response with projection. The performance started to take on a narrative for me based on the pre-recorded tape. I originally envisioned this dynamic to be more of a call and response: video plays, I react vocally to what is being projected, I create movement or a new projection based on the sound, modify the sound in response to the new video and so on.
Triggering the scream. Doug mentioned that there are different ways to trigger events with Isadora, such as having it react to a certain pitch. This seems really interesting to me. Would like to experiment with this and see what happens.
Do I keep the scream at all? It was fun to do in scratch 1. Is its purpose going to fade if/when the performance gets longer?
What is the right balance between naturalistic and hypertheatricality? I think this was an underlying thread to the whole discussion on Friday. I'm going to keep the singing, which is already an unnatural/theatrical mode of expression, so why or why not continue to push the performance along that naturalistic/theatrical spectrum?
Find a good reason to keep the monitors. My gut is telling me they need to stay, but they were the weakest link in the performance on Friday. Just need to push their use more to find the answer to this.
Spend more time moving around the space. Positive response to the moment when I got up and starting walking and singing in the space. It's an interesting moment for me too to "break free" from my tethering to the computer and projected image.
If I do spend more time up and about, do I also build in triggers that might respond to something I'm doing that can happen when I'm not at the computer?
Make the performance longer. 10 minutes isn't enough time! I knew this. Was a good test. Time to try different lengths. 15, 20, 30 minutes? 1 hour? 2 hours? Hm...

What to focus on for Thursday?
I think I will try to focus on the call and response method of building the performance and see if I can work out a more 'random' trigger for the scream so that it takes me by surprise when it happens. 15-20 minute duration.

Videos of scratch performance 1

2008-07-04T11:54:00.000-07:00

Posting these here. Interested in any comments you might have. Will post my thoughts afterwards/what next? type stuff over the weekend. Overall, I'm happy with the way this went off, of course realizing that there's alot to play with still. But this clarified alot for me.

Tech notes for the curious:
The technical spine of this performance is Isadora to record my voice on the fly (thanks Doug for figuring out how to do this!) and play back so that I could layer in real time. Video was also being projected from Isadora and I created a couple of scenes to shift between modes. The first transition, I triggered with the space bar, the second one was an automated scene shift using the pulse generator. The televisions had a live feed playing back on them from the camera placed on top of each one. That's the video that you are seeing below here. I recommend watching the two videos in the order they're placed here. It was the way that the audience approached the piece.

backblog - MA Open Studios

2008-07-03T12:20:00.000-07:00

After a week of illness and trips to the hospital, I was not as far along as i had hoped for the MA Open Studios on 20 June. However, I decided to once again just go after a very simple, and specific thing: I wanted to test out what it was like to adopt an "open studio" tone to my performance. I again played with reflections, only this time, I set up a monitor in the studio space opposite me and trained it, live, on myself working on my computer. In the end, people did what they do when they see themselves on camera: react to that (fix hair, make faces, etc.) Then most of them noticed me smiling at them "behind them" or on screen and would come over for a chat. I loved this because it meant that people were coming to me on their own terms and interacting with the camera and monitor in completely honest ways without me telling them what to do. I also let them sit down and see what I was seeing from my computer. My idea to adopt an "open studio" "performance" tone for the final show? A KEEPER!

Here's a LAYERIZED excert of some of the footage. I compiled this on the night of the show. And am constantly amazed at how neat simple transparency can be. I really like some of the chance compositions that happened here.

backblog - Group staring contest

2008-07-03T12:11:00.000-07:00

Testing: Reflections

What happens when a group of people is confronted with several monitors and a live person staying at them? or the monitors watching them? This was testing out a very tiny idea which had subsequently morphed in more interesting ways. Most interesting thing about this time with the group was watching how the group was influenced in their movement around the space by:

- the technology
- the other people in the group
- me

It's quite startling.

When the mundane turns cinematic

2008-06-27T08:48:00.000-07:00

I am struggling through a backlog of entries due to illness. And while I was pulling together slightly more involved entries, I found this piece of footage that I shot a few weeks ago for whatever reason and it interested me to post about it here.

A comment that keeps coming up is an interest in playing with scale between live and projected image. This ties in with the idea of telematic vs cinematic which comes up in just about every conversation I have with Doug.

Another thing that I want to play with over the coming week, and for the scratch (next week!) is my interest in the awkward or really mundane moments.

Therefore, the question that popped into my head is when I saw this was:
What happens when you turn a mundane action into something cinematic?

And the question I pose to all of you is:
What's going on in this clip?
I'm curious what difference it makes having sound on and off?

Being a performer for someone else.

2008-06-11T12:50:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks, I have been rehearsing for a piece that will be performed at Laban Contemporary Dance as part of a showcase of MA Dance Theatre students. The piece I'm part of is by Nicola Conibere and it's been really useful to simply be a performer, in a purely dance/movement based piece. (thanks again, Harriet, for the tip!)

Nicola's research is taking her along many similar paths to my own and I have been fascinated to see where the intersections are. IN particular, she is interested in how people encounter one another, particularly in a theatrical context. The choreography is creating a structure that the performers have some flexibility with and our action is triggered by audience members entering and leaving the space.

I will do a more detailed write up here in the blog once the performance is over, this is something of a publicity notice for the upcoming show. There will be all sorts of performances going on throughout the building that night, so it should be a good time and I believe it's free.

Here are the details for Nicola's performance:

Studio 4
Laban Contemporary dance
creekside
london SE8 3DZ
(between deptford and greenwich)

Performance time: 6.30/7pm - 9.30pm

The piece is durational and only 8 audience members will be allowed in the space at a time, so you might have to queue a little bit. Hopefully not too long.

New sketches.

2008-06-03T04:41:00.000-07:00

The weekly rehearsal time in a classroom at WCA have been really useful. I've posted 6 clips on my YouTube channel which I encourage you to go take a look at by clicking here. Too many to post here, but I've included 2 in this post.

Questions that were highlighted last week:
1. What is it like to have me tweaking equipment and explaining things to people during the performance?

2. How will I use isadora live? I like the layers (more on this below)

3. What it might look like to have two projections: 1 which is showing "source" material and one which is showing "composite" like this:

4. This clip has some interesting moments where the line between recorded and "live" image gets pretty blurred. Can this effect be achieved when you are actually live in the space, or is it working because of the cropping I chose for this shot? What strategies might achieve this live?

Some responses to above based on what I've done so far:
1. The tweaking looks like anyone else tweaking things onstage. I think it's probably inevitable, but I'm sure I can work on fluid strategies to minimize it or make it an integral "beat" within the performance. Maybe pre-recorded elements that don't require so much attention.

2. I didn't remember that Isadora allows you to layer multiple channels of video on the fly. This is, of course, one of my favorite techniques that has been in my work since I picked up a video camera 8 years ago. But what is it other than a neat technique? Why am I interested in it?

A passage of poetry that has been with me for 15 years from "The Layers" by Stanley Kunitz:

"Live in the layers,
not on the litter."
Though I lack the art
to decipher it,
no doubt the next chapter
in my book of transformations
is already written.
I am not done with my changes.

After last Thursday, I see the direct link between the transparent video layers, plus the layering of live and recorded presence, and skin. Amelia Jones brings it up over and over again in her writing, but I hadn't really felt how it connected to my work. I've noticed that as I review these sketches and think about Jones' idea of the skin stretching across technology (and in my case: other people, recorded and live presence, and the space we're in, sound, image, light, bodies) - it feels like each layer that I build is actually peeling back a skin as a boundary or border. I think this is what I'm looking for for this performance: the point at which all the layers have built up so much that they start to break down and merge so that we become less aware of the individual components that make up the performance and focus on the experience as a whole.

3. I realized that having the "source" and "composite" material projected simultaneously is similar to what it's like to be in the video editing quite. There's this other strand that I want people to come along through my whole process, warts and all, so having elements in the performance space that echo the behind the scenes structures of the filmmaking process is appealing. It's not all pretty, but another thing I would like to explore is: if I bring people along on my journey through the process, will they be more able to immerse themselves in the final piece?

4. Reviewing this footage has made me think that maybe it's not a bad thing to have some pre-recorded foundation elements. These would be recorded in the space and I could trigger when they get played, but they'd be guaranteed "good" takes that can serve as a foundation for a spontaneous improv. I think this is particularly clear with #4 where it is easy in editing to make yourself look "good" and confident, but there's not a whole lot you can do live if you start to lose your confidence or slip up. That's the beauty of the juxtaposition right there, I think. What if you highlight and loop the "bad" stuff? Does it become beautiful at some point? Does it make the live presence look better? Am I more HUMAN? (ugh, I didn't want to write it, but I thought it, so here it is.)

Other things:
I miss the singing, but still like the incidental noise (paper rustling in this case, the door shutting) I want to reincorporate the "footstep" ambient noise of people moving in the space as a foundation room tone for my pieces.

As is often the case, my brain has started spinning more after writing this. I'll leave it here for now. Looking forward to this week's practice.

Goat Island: helping me begin.

2008-05-28T05:34:00.000-07:00

On Sunday, 18 May, I took a day long workshop with Goat Island at Siobhan Davies Studios in Elephant & Castle. Their work has come up time and again in my research and there was enough said to peak my interest without really being able to put my finger on why. After this workshop, and seeing their performance of their new and "last" performance The Lastmaker this past Saturday, I have a better understanding of why.

Their work is intellectually deep, physically demanding, and pretty abstract. Yet I never lost sight of the 5 people on stage as being anything but "themselves" or, maybe in other words, of how human they were. When they were doing ensemble choreographies, they would often be doing the same movements, but in their own way. There was not a pinch of arrogance or aloofness in anything they did.

This is the pitch I would love to achieve with my work. Watching their performance made me want to run off and join their circus. But for now, obviously, I've got to do my own thing. And use a tool and material that they gave me to begin this final phase of developing a performance for September.

They say it better than I can about their technique:

Goat Island performance work is a series of responses: to the exercises we give ourselves, to our surroundings, to the events of the world, but mostly, to each other. We perform responses for each other back and forth. The conversation goes further than were we just talking. At the end of the conversation we have a piece in front of us and it's ready to show. These conversations take place over a long period of time. As in a chess match, each response is carefully considered. Time, and therefore, dreams and reverie are part of the conversation. These conversations can be two years long. This gives time for a history to grow and for us to interpret it, for distortions to take on their own meaning, their own demands.
(from their website)

This technique of "response" was also brought up in the last workshop I blogged about. I'm finding that I resonate with this way of producing material. I need to constantly "do" and review to understand what is going on with my work. I think this technique also lends itself to performing with my recorded image on video screens. Echoes, layers, sparks...many words to describe the effect. And most importantly, it helps answer that question

WHERE DO I BEGIN?!?!?!

A quote that we were given in the workshop before a 10 minute walk to the Imperial War Museum:

The intricate cooperation of muscle and nerve fibers produce the means by which an organism interacts with its surrounding environment. That cooperation has a name which is movement. When the environment itself enters into fibrillation, it is the whole system (organism/environment) that becomes convulsive. The body absorbs all the shocks only to release them later on, in another time space, as unforeseen motions, reorganizing as much as outlining the distribution of violence in the nervous system. - Andre Lepecki from his book Exhausting Dance

Right now, I'm working with echoes from the Goat Island workshop. As with a natural echo down a canyon, this one goes through phases, not just evenly getting quieter the further away it gets from me in time and space, but occasionally getting louder as it bounces off a particularly well curved canyon wall.

I loved this quote from Andre Lepecki, especially the part about the body absorbing shocks only to release them later. That's exactly what is going on with me as I continue to process that workshop. I decided to use this quote as a literal starting point for my rehearsal time last week. I did a couple of recordings that I'm digitizing and will continue to build off of tomorrow when I go back. I'm going to play with Isadora tomorrow too and see how that goes. Will post the results early next week. or rather, will post the process early next week.

Monday Night Improvisation.

2008-04-15T06:21:00.000-07:00

Went to an improv class last night hosted by Independent Dance @ Siobhan Davies Studios in Elephant & Castle. Wow! Gorgeous space and I found the workshop incredibly useful and productive. I'm definitely going to make this a regular activity.

The class features a different instructor each week, so I will get exposed to different dancers/movers ideas for improvisational movement. Just what I need!!!! This week the instructor was Marie-Gabrielle Rotie. Her name has popped up a bunch when I was searching for Butoh classes in London, so I was curious to experience a workshop with her.

A little recap of what we did:

The idea was to create movement "scores" from existing visual material to get ideas flowing and a sense of poetry to give us some phrases to keep in mind as we moved.

- instructor passed out postcards of painting to each of us.
- we spent some time looking at them and then performed a 12-15 minute improvisation based on our observations, however abstract that ended up being.
- our partners then performed a 5-6 min improv based on what they observed from ours.
- we then spent about 5 minutes writing down what we saw to create a sort of score
- discussed our scores
- performed a duet based on scores, observations, and the original painting

Here are the scores we wrote for each painting

#1 - surreal painting with 2 girls (one with very weedlike hair standing straight up on end) standing on a landing in a house with a very large sunflower draped on a staircase sorry I didn't mark down the titles of the paintings...

Partner's score:
Reaching, reaching up
Spiral & sway
Pulled off centre
Pieces torn off
Still the impulse to rise

My Score:
1) A plant/human awakening
2) spiraling, the fluid gravity defying plant hair
3) feeling the energy source above as it gets warmer
4) the leaves stretch & spiral out towards the energy source into the space
5) spurts of energy from outside back in
6) always aware of the warmth above and your roots growing down, 2) and 3)
7) human/plant hybrid reveling in the warm silt that you're grown out of
8) pleasing across your leaves/skin as you wallow in it
9) ALWAYS RETURN TO 6) out, 2) and 3)

The Duet
- We ended up becoming this single entity that was growing and spiraling up, out, lots of swirly arm movements! We started with our backs to each other and I really loved how we were able to start moving together because I could feel his shoulder blades on my back as he started to raise his arms and do the spiral gestures with them. Was a great way to cue without having to look at each other. We also realized before the duet that we had had similar experiences of the painting, so it was quite easy to stay cohesive with our movements. Of course, there were times when we crashed into each other unpleasantly, but I felt like those were surprisingly few considering we had never met, let alone danced together before.

Painting #2: a nativity scene from the Uffizi gallery complete with angels, shepherds and the blinding light surrounding the wee baby Jesus & Mary (oh and Joseph too, I guess, kinda...) I walked away from this painting focussing on this tumbling S shape that the angels and shepherd's bodies made down the left side of the painting towards the baby. The all had fairly strong gestures with their left hands, but odd expressions on their faces. Including the baby! All of the characters had very "real" and not terribly "awestruck at the holiness" look on their faces.

My Score:
the angel floating
What am I doing here?

the man gazing down
What am I doing here?

the baby looking up
What are they doing here?

the left hand
surprised
covetous
caressing
blessing

My partner's score:
Changing perspectives
Changes of emotions
Movement between stillness

The Duet
Ended up being a serious of poses/tableau style with mostly gentle movement in between. Not always synchronous, sometimes building on the other person's pose. Facial expressions and hand gestures were the emphasis. As we moved to poses, our relationship to each other shifted. Sometimes we were 2 disconnected characters reacting in our own way to "the baby." Sometimes one of us was the baby and there were strong moments in these phases where the other person's hand was closing in on the baby, sometimes gentle, sometimes menacing. And there were times when we were a unit outside gazing at the baby. Some of these were funny even since there was one guy front and center who had this really amused, jovial "hey guys! check this kid out! Son of a gun!" kind of look on his fave.

Other notes, impressions
I was really skeptical of being able to come up with anything out of my painting because of all the loaded symbolism of the nativity scene, but we were both really satisfied with the final result. And of course, I enjoyed shifting from one character and perspective to another. :) Also useful and interesting to experiment with conveying multiple perspectives in a piece with just my body and my gestures/expressions.

I found it extremely useful to observe the other person's movement and then experience for myself what I had seen. For example, I noticed something I hadn't really considered in my partner: he had this really strong vertical focus to his movement, even when he was moving quite dramatically from side to side. I read in his movement a consciousness of an energy source above and feet/roots growing into the earth. And a spiraling movement. Was really cool to experience what it felt like to have that vertical focus even when moving sideways.

This technique seemed to produce some very workable results quickly. I was thinking of doing something similar with songs in sketches of my own seeing how it would get more abstract and more "my own" the further away from the song I got alternating between sound and movement phases. Now I will definitely play with that.

I loved the implied plant/human hybrid of the first piece since I've been thinking so much about the blurring of borders between machine & human as I related to my video camera in new ways. To play with another hybrid, cyborg idea was great fun and relevant.

While this class was only tangentially related to Butoh, I noticed a thread with the other specifically Butoh class I took: this notion of having an image in mind as you create movement (like the plant/hybrid with crazy weed hair.) It doesn't really matter if the specificity of it comes across, but it is a great way to give some purpose to the performer's movement and stay interested in what you're doing.

I have a crazy vivid imagination that will just go and go and go when I let it. I must must must remember this always when I'm performing!

free association

2008-04-15T06:08:00.000-07:00

Eureka?! gasp

2008-04-12T09:48:00.000-07:00

Could it be???

Is the elephant in the room, in fact, that this whole "dispersed, multiply identified post-modern subject," isn't the core, but merely a light support of my central argument & position?

More to come...

Daily weekly semi-regular performance sketches

2008-04-09T09:45:00.000-07:00

After the David Gale workshop, we all realized how nice it is to just get some quick performances together and see what's going on.

Since I'm exploring interacting with myself on video and it's just so easy to post video to the web these days, I am going to endeavor to post some sketches to this blog. At the very least, it will be weekly. Hopefully, it will be much more frequent than that.

I constantly think that what I'm doing is pretty abstract, so I hope that involving some nebulous "net public" at this stage will help to open my practice up to folks and maybe take some of the mystery out of it - for me too!

I can't wait for all the really rude juvenile comments on YouTube...

These 3 videos are me interacting with different layers of video. I wanted to alternate between sound and movement, but it's all kinda static. However, I thought some neat stuff was starting to happen by the last one. Especially giving some context and purpose to what I felt was pretty random weird movement in the second one.

I also know you guys love hearing me singing like I've never had a singing lesson in my life! It's very liberating.

Video half of performance workshop w/ David Gale

2008-04-09T09:40:00.000-07:00

Digitized and posted the video portion of the performance I did a couple weeks ago as part of the workshop with David Gale. It was a quick purging performance where I got a little goofy on the video, and was overly wooden with the live component. A sort of overstating what I've been feeling about my work.

Anyway, here is the video.

Something specific?

2008-04-07T13:51:00.000-07:00

Harriet's encouraged me to post my ideas on my blog. In my current state of too many ideas in my head, and the nagging little perfectionist voice, I resisted at first, but see that it could be useful!

This is supremely rough, but getting clearer. I welcome any questions. I would also just love to hear what thoughts spring to mind when reading through this. Free association welcome! About your own practice, what you have seen in mine, other artists, other critical thinkers....

I am also still working out the right balance and hierarchy of these ideas to make sure I emphasize the pieces that are more relevant to my work at this stage and don't dwell on exciting, but less relevant ones.

I need some perspective....opinions, thoughts, that might help unclog the mass of interesting thoughts in my head!

Finally:
**What is the obvious question I haven't asked that is in plain sight after reading this entry?

What is the question?
1) multiply identified, dispersed subject - The Techno/subject in performance
- good position as a multi-media artist
- I don't feel that this notion has really hit the public consciousness even though the idea's been around for over a decade at least

2) can technology be used as a bridge between the different levels of embodiment?
2a) is technology a barrier or a bridge to live performance?
- this is where my initial proposal left off. It seems unfinished, but possibly still relevant and interesting if paired w/ #1?

3) As a performer, how do you extend your sense of embodiment to your audience?
3a) "stretching your skin" across different media; collapsing time/space/identity/reality boundaries?
3b) bringing them into the process when it's still a process instead of a final product?
- I'm going to be asking this over and over as I develop my practice regardless of whether it manifests itself this literally in the research proposal or not.

Pieces that might fit into the puzzle and flesh out the argument:
a) revisiting layers of embodiment that I explored in original proposal draft from January.

b) post-modern/techno theorists in 1990s recurring theme - boundaries between self/human body and animals/nature and technology are eroding. there's a resistance and fear of this, but also an opportunity to re-cast notions we hold of the Self or Individual
- Vivian Sobchack "technologies such as the computer have profoundly changed the temporal and spatial shape and meaning of our life-works and our own bodily and symbolic sense of ourselves."

c) virtual reality vs. reality
- Mark Poster article section "Reality problematized" - "'virtual reality' is a more dangerous term since it suggests that reality may be multiple or take many forms."

d) it's just a tool. learn it. use it well.
- Laurie Anderson, Pamela Z, Piplotti Rist, Janet Cardiff: artists who are comfortably working with high tech tools but don't overstate the importance of the technology/tools that they use to create their work.
- example: Laurie Anderson says her work has backed off from the big multimedia extravaganzas. However, her performances are still highly technology-reliant: microphone, synths, violins. Stripped down aesthetically, so that it becomes more "invisible" and doesn't overwhelm the content, but it's still very integral to the creation of her work.

e) free software movement/electronics hacking like Dorkbot
- de-mystifcation of technology through building your own tools, taking apart existing technology and seeing how it works. How you can change it to do something else
- I see a total link to the resurgence of the DIY/craft movement.
- open source de-emphasizes authorship and de-centralizes the creation and dissemination of the technology, creates a community of people who want to keep ideas free and open (like blogging about potentially 'proprietary' thoughts like I'm doing right now.)

f) Amelia Jones - why her as key critical thinker to my research
- explicitly links dispersed, multiple subject to performance and technology
- using technology explicitly to break with notions of fixed Self and extend beyond constructed boundary of the skin (ew! messy!!!)
- the contemporary subject is already technologized and therefore same rules don't apply because no longer simply "human"(ist?)
- from this point of view, the reason for an artist to place their own body/Self in their artwork shifts: - Jones "This mediated, multiply identified, particularized body/self proclaims the utter loss of the "subject" (in this case the fully intentional artist) as a stable referent (origin of the artwork's meaning)
- Body/Self - sense of Self is not lost, just redefined in connection to the layers that make you up and surround you, including the intangible, "virtual" ones

Bringing it back to my practice
- processing a live feed means I can interact with my own images moments later and an audience can witness the full creation of this (embodiment through relation of performer's physical body with the virtual body, physical form of the video technology, proximity of audience members's physical bodies, most likely projection of audience's bodies on the screens with performer's virtual body, journey together through creative process instead of audience simply witnessing a final product)

- even though there are multiple, simultaneous projections of my image, I am part of a larger
system. The video projections allow a more literal manifestation of this idea

- thinking about my practice as a performing art appeals to me because theater/performing arts have always created a space for me where I can explore modes of expression that might otherwise be suppressed in day to day life.
- primordial? expression. pre-verbal: Lisa Gerrard, Meredith Monk.

Nunning sketches.

2008-03-10T16:06:00.000-07:00

Check out the "related video" links on my YouTube site for these! Ha!

Taking a stab at an answer. Sound.

2008-03-10T10:34:00.000-07:00

So, in my last post I mentioned that I do believe that I walked away from this piece being most interested in the sonic dimensions of it. For me, this means that I'll be moving away from the format I used for the Nunnery show–something I was quite sure was going to happen anyway, but wanted to see out while I learned more about technology I need to learn. Right, so that was vague.

Clues about what I'm interested in: the artists I've come across that excite or interest me, they're all from music backgrounds!

Overall performance and fluid use of technology without getting stuck behind it:

Laurie Anderson
Looking at retrospective texts of her work, she has dipped her fingers into all sorts of interesting areas. I'll post a more thorough bit about particular pieces that interest me when I've read, listened, watched more.
Pamela Z (thanks Lucy!)
Looked at this video and went "yeah, that's essentially what I want to do!" Of course, I don't have a body synth or operatic training; and I want to consider the performance space more than projections, equipment, me. But really, amazingly inspirational stuff and very closely aligned to my interests.

Others:
- Meredith Monk (I like the fact that she started as a dancer)
- Christian Wolz (came across him when looking at descriptions of the Giving Voice festival at Center for Performance Research the end of the month)
- the "gibberish" muses from my goth past: Lisa Gerrard (Dead Can Dance) and Liz Fraser (Cocteau Twins)

Initial thoughts on Nunning.

2008-03-10T06:41:00.000-07:00

Learned a bunch from the Nunnery show. The overarching impression I've walked away from my piece with is that I've thrown open too many doors and have to figure out which ones are the ones I'm interested in moving forward with. I may or may not get around to organizing them into themes before I post this. Just want to get things down while they're still quite fresh.

So what is the piece about? Let's start with what seems to be there based on observations and audience feedback:

pretty singing
minimal, often unconfident live performance
slippage between live and recorded image. What is actually happening live and what is pre-recorded? (I even saw one woman taking the headphones off in the middle of watching it, which was fantastic)
immersion of viewer through soundtrack
alienation of viewer through trapping them in a corner behind a camera and forcing them to watch complicated video piece on a small screen
a layered piece that was read on different levels by different people
a vague sense that there was "alot there" but no one at the actual performance who could put a finger on it
from feedback pre-performance "extremely rich" area to explore. Yes, I'm finding it overwhelmingly rich!
putting the audience in my shoes behind the camera
confusing the role of the viewer to those around them who think that the person behind the camera is actually filming. As a result, preventing many possible viewers from approaching the camera and watching the piece.

What I wanted it to be about, or things that I put in there on purpose:

embodiment in space of both viewer and performer
performer highlights interesting aspects of space through movement and vocalization
video reinforces these
performer ultimately becomes integrated into the different sensory layers of the space
viewer becomes embodied simultaneously through immersion and alienation. When they walk away from the piece, they have a heightened awareness of the space.
3 phases to video that shifted mood, but also shifted weight of foreground/background between the video and the physical space
mirroring 3 phases live

What seems to be ideal viewing moment for this piece?

when the place has some people milling around, or walking from place to place
when I appear live in the space as well, especially when singing. even if the singing isn't the same tune as the video piece.

If I did piece like this again, conditions I would insist upon:

layered space: a place where there are people walking through, different points of entry and exit. I tried the piece in 5 different locations, both at WCA and at the Nunnery. The most interesting ones had people in different planes from the viewer walking through the frame. The 2 locations that were enclosed rooms were pretty boring.
2-3 days in the space before the performance to rehearse and plot out performance sound and movement. The performance side of things continued to be weak for the whole weekend. My performance skills are at a point where I still need to have a clear plan in place ahead of time. I can't wing it and hope for the best, even if I love improv. Sticking to a path and controlled movement on Sunday made me feel like I was starting to get there, and allowed me to find a good pitch to my performance over time. I was hoping that having all this time would do exactly that. However, in the future, I need to have this time BEFORE the actual performance!
2-3 full days of shooting with rough edits performed each evening or on the fly. Although I felt good about the work I did in the Nunnery. I ended up limiting my possibilities by only taking half a day there. Things that I thought would work together when reviewing the tape in the space ended up not working together at all. Editing is so easy with final cut these days!

But what exactly is the main point of interest or focal point of the piece?

is it about the space?
is it about the performer? in the foreground or the background?
the viewer? alienated or immersed?
the articulation of space through movement? sound? alienation? interruption? integration?
my embodiment as a performer within my body? surroundings? in relation to the technology? the viewer?

Other things I felt or heard repeatedly:

When I think back on this weekend, I feel like I'm playing a conceptual tennis match. Except no one's keeping score.
live performance was chaos until Sunday. On Sunday, I had time to find something to do with myself that seemed to hold things together more. I created a walk for myself around the gallery walking backwards and forwards as if I were another person just looking at the art. However, once in a while I would stop and study something that wasn't the art, or start singing. If someone blocked my path, I reversed direction.It was interesting and seemed to make the piece hold together better.
the whole piece "worked" on Sunday, but what do I mean by that?
at what point do I give up and get someone who is a trained performer to do it for me? This question makes me really angry. I feel like there is some assumption that if you're not really good, you shouldn't put yourself in your work. How will I learn if I'm not in the work? And yet ultimately, when does my lack of performance skill get in the way of me communicating what I want to with the piece? I can't answer this right now. Still narrowing down what the piece is about?
is it really important that people sit behind a camera? What would be other ways of doing this?
soundtrack was fab.
I realized that I was most interested in the sonic dimension of the space.
I am also most interested in exploring the sonic dimension of video. I think. The one piece of this I can clarify right now is that I think the true power of video rests in its marriage of both sound and image.
most people wanted to sit with the piece longer than one cycle. This is good. However, the underlying criticism of this is that I should have made the piece longer, chosen maybe 1 mood, or made each section longer.
The discussion on Saturday kept coming back to the idea of audience expectations. This was most interesting because it made me think about all the unexpected, or extraneous things that audience members might focus on with my piece. For example, the whole thing about people spending ages in the space and not touching my piece because they didn't really it was a piece and the signifiers for a camera on a tripod are not to approach. This throws a whole new debate about my piece out there. And I need to be careful about such things because it can detract from what I am more interested in communicating with people.
The other thing that comes to mind about being trapped behind the camera is that one of the interesting things about Janet Cardiff's video walks was that even though the viewer is behind the camera, their bodies are in motion, which seems like a freer way of experiencing the piece and perhaps enhances the viewer's embodiment of the piece. (I do believe Harriet made some comment along these lines when she viewed my test piece!)
The piece was TOO hidden. I didn't want the performance to be in your face. But I wanted people to be aware of it. People were aware of my presence more than they were of the video. Sadly, my presence was nowhere near as interesting as the video.
Do I need to be in the space to make the piece "work"? Are people walking away with what I intended when my presence in real time isn't there?
Do I need to control when the viewers encounter me in the physical space?
Is it interesting to have it unravel completely differently for every viewer?

Nunning.

2008-03-05T15:24:00.001-08:00

Hi Blog! How are you? I have been neglecting you.
There have been things that I felt the urge to post, but wanted to elaborate on. I regret that this has led to nothing being posted in a month?! Good grief.

And now my performance at the Nunnery is imminent. I'm really curious to see how it goes. It's been very interested to be present during the curation of the show. I tried to throw in my two cents here and there, but of course I know nothing about these matters. Overall, I feel like my presence over the last couple of days was appreciated and there's been a great, casual collaboration amongst us as we run our thoughts and ideas past each other. I think it's also been invaluable to just be in the space so that I'm not walking in tomorrow night only having spent a couple of hours in there previously.

I'm terribly nervous about the private view tomorrow night. My main fear is that the whole place will become hushed when I start singing. Now that I'm typing it, I can see how it might actually be incredibly bizarre and powerful. But the assumption that I have about my audience is that they're expecting a Performance, a prepared song, something worth shutting up and listening to. I'd rather they just kept on talking. I like the disjunction that my piece is creating with this weird, out-of-time thing people and the space are just doing their thing in the present tense around it.

Other than that, I think it's going to be a fantastic experience and exhausting and that by Sunday I'll have a rhythm to it. I'm happy with the video, with the voiced and unspoken reactions my "test audience" has been having to it. Wish the private view was Sunday...must go in tomorrow early and just try some things out and continue to get to know the space.

I really want this to go well.

The Emancipated Spectator

2008-02-06T11:31:00.000-08:00

Just finished reading the article "The Emancipated Spectator" by Jacques Rancière and wanted to recommend it to my fellow VLPers who don't have Amanda as your reading group tutor. A copy of it is in the folder in the studio.

It's an interesting walk through different ways of interpreting knowledge and ignorance , and roles that 'distance' can play in our understanding. All this with theatre as the framework that he uses to argue his points.

Take this nugget that is the call out on the last page of the article:

Theater should question its privileging of living presence and bring the stage back to a level of equality with the telling of a story or the writing and the reading of a book. It should call for spectators who are active interpreters, who render their own translation, who appropriate the story for themselves and who ultimately make their own story out of it. An emancipated community is in fact a community of storytellers and translators.

Looking forward to the discussion tomorrow. All sorts of thoughts bubbling through my head.

Loopy Logic

2008-01-29T05:55:00.000-08:00

Doug sets up a scenario in a program called Isadora for the Group Show "family" portrait studio and says that it's a great program for live video manipulation, etc.
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I start researching Isadora and other object oriented programming
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My brain hurts, so I start researching artists
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I find out that Laurie Anderson worked with a video artist called Mark Coniglio on her current project (which I am seeing April 30! wee!)
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I think "hm, Mark Conigilio, that sounds familiar."
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Mark Coniglio wrote Isadora (see above)

Enough of this annoying format:
Conigilio is also one of the artistic directors of a multimedia/dance company called Troika Ranch. Their most recent piece is called "Loop Diver." I want to read the blog they have about it in more detail, but I have an initial reaction to some videos they've posted on YouTube. It seems like in their video BKLYN and in devising the choreography in Loop Diver, they are using the technology to drive what the human bodies are doing. In descriptions of other works on their website, the have developed tools that trigger sound, video and graphical images that respond to the shape and movement quality of the dancers, but aren't necessarily of the dancers. Particularly sound seems to be some pre-recorded composition that isn't based on the sounds coming from the performers.

Contrast to some of my interests:
- the body of the performer triggers the sound and video
- that sound and video content is the performers' body (movement, sound, speech), not just triggered by it.

here are some of Troika Ranch's video sketches (I also like the fact that they're posting sketches of their process):

This last one is a bit bausea inducing as it goes along and not recommended if you are seizure prone. Otherwise, very interesting experiment and the first bit before it gets all manic is so beautiful.

The Creative Habit

2008-01-27T09:13:00.000-08:00

Amongst other things, I have picked up Twyla Tharp's book the Creative Habit. I am enjoying parts of it and appreciate that Tharp gives you some exercises and examples that have helped her in her own life that sound very prescriptive, but is careful to reiterate throughout that these are simply suggestions and that we all have our own way of working most effectively. That said, when I came to this questionnaire (below) in a section about our "creative DNA", I started to feel like a failure and a fraud because I couldn't think of clear answers for many of the questions. I have never had a singular or clear vision about the path my life would take. Add to this a general reluctance to follow prescribed exercises like this, and there was no question that I had to try and answer this questionnaire.

Here it is. I will post responses in another post to follow. Would love to see what you all think about it and if you end up taking it, if found it at all interesting or useful.

*******
Take the following questionnaire. If even one answer tells you something new about yourself, you're one step closer to understanding your creative DNA. There are no right answers here. The exercise is intended for your eyes only, which means no cheating, no answers to impress other people. It's supposed to be an honest self-appraiseal of what matters to you. Anything less is a distortion. I include it here and urge you to answer quickly, instinctively. Don't dawdle.

Your Creative Autobiography

What is the first creative moment you remember?
Was anyone there to witness or appreciate it?
What is the best idea you ever had?
What made it great in your mind?
What is the dumbest idea?
What made it stupid?
Can you connect the dots that led you to this idea?
What is your creative ambition?
What are the obstacles to this ambition?
What are the vital steps to achieving this ambition?
How do you begin your day?
What are your habits? What patterns do you repeat?
Describe your first successful creative act.
Describe your second successful creative act.
Compare them.
What are your attitudes toward: money, power, praise, rivals, work, play?
Which artists do you admire most?
Why are they your role models?
What do you and your role models have in common?
Does anyone in your life regularly inspire you?
Who is your muse?
Define muse.
When confronted with superior intelligence or talent, how do you respond?
When faced with stupidity, hostility, intransigence, laziness, or indifference in others, how do you respond?
When faced with the impending success or the threat of failure, how do you respond?
When you work, do you love the process or the result?
At what point do you feel your reach exceeds your grasp?
What is your ideal creative activity?
What is your greatest fear?
What is the likelihood of either of the answers to the previous two questions happening?
Which of your answers would you most like to change?
What is your idea of mastery?
What is your greatest dream?

It's all Geek to me!

2008-01-24T10:16:00.000-08:00

I'm researching tools that should help me realize my vision of a live melee comprised of body-based sounds and images (keep those fart jokes to yourself!)

Although there has been discussion previously, today is serious Day One on that journey. So much so that I'm unable to communicate what I've learned so far.

I will post links:

Object oriented programming software:
Isadora - http://www.troikatronix.com/isadora.html
Max/MSP - http://www.cycling74.com/products/maxmsp
PureData - http://puredata.info/

Microcontroller hubs, boards, something like that... (laugh now, but in a month I'll be looking at you as if you're a luddite because you don't know what I'm talking about):
Arduino - http://arduino.cc/
Eroktronix - http://www.eroktronix.com/

Here's my favorite quote of the day:
So if you yearn for an electromagnetic catapult that flings jelly at the audience every time you rattle your tambourine, or a USB incense burner which radiates progressively stronger smells as the temperature in the church hall rises, Pure Data can help you achieve this!

****YES!****

I just wrote, re-wrote, and deleted a paragraph of panicky apprehension about going down this route. I realize that I need to stave off the panic until I really invest the time to at least try to learn some of this because I can see that proficiency in this type of programming will lead to lots of interesting possibilities moving forward.

Next steps:
- try these things out
- understand enough to be able to ask the right questions to get the help from others that I need.

Assessment round 1 site

2008-01-22T09:19:00.000-08:00

Uploaded the website I designed for this first round of assessments.

Click HERE to view!

The only thing missing from the site are the workshop outlines I created for the ones I conducted myself. I'm happy to share them with folks on the course if you're curious. Just email me or comment here and I'll send them to you.

drool

2008-01-15T03:25:00.000-08:00

The whole damn concept of it makes the little punky thrift store shopping teenage girl in me swoon:

http://www.elsewhereelsewhere.org/residencies.html

Related Lena video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OALUIFrs41o

Research Proposal - January 2008

2008-01-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

Activating the Body of a Tech Performer

Embodiment theory is used across the performance spectrum to develop performance personae and devise content. Applied to performers whose work involves the use of technology (e.g. live camera, VJ, electronic sound artists,) some of these ideas could be a starting point to develop active “tech performers” as opposed to the more traditional, passive “tech operators.” The first embodiment concept of interest is that the individual’s mind and body are inseparable since they are both part of a single entity. Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater and Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s Pocha Nostra are two techniques that draw on this notion to develop a performer’s “presence” outside the traditional notions of representational theatre. The second concept is that the individual is part of a larger system. This “larger system” includes other performers, audience, performance space, and community, as described in accounts of the Happenings during the 1960s and 1970s and advocated by artists such as Richard Schechner (Govan, 2007.)

Guillermo Gomez-Peña has a pragmatic description of the distinction between perfomance art and traditional acting in his essay "In Defense of Performance, XXII Time and Space” (Gomez-Peña, 2005.) Performers must develop a sense of “presence” as opposed to “representation”; “being here” in the space as opposed to “acting” (ibid, p.39.) In performance art, the audience is up next to you, interacting with you. "Every detail and every small gesture makes a statement." (ibid, p.126.) Gomez-Peña’s strategy for developing a performance “persona” is deeply rooted in embodiment theory. The development of a persona draws on a performer’s experience and personal contradictions and is then “activated” through the exploration of actions that "contain the flesh and bones" of the emerging persona (ibid, p.127) and begins to communicate the hallmarks of the performance persona. Finally, the body is transformed into “performance mode” starting with transforming the face and expression, down through to the feet until the persona inhabits every pore of the performer.

Ruth Zaporah’s Action Theater offers performance strategies such as “the improvisation of presence” (1995) and “embodied content” (2007) which stem from her background as a dancer and an improvisor. To gain full performance presence, the body is tuned through a series of exercises that break down the performer’s actions to the most elemental states*. An accutely detailed awareness of and fascination with both physical and psychic states at all times is key to developing a performance because all content will arise from this presence. As Zaporah puts it, these “sensory details are the signs and arrows that point in the direction of your next move.” (Zaporah, 1995. p.109) Through this process, an active performer emerges ready to trust that every experience that arises from the body will create a stimulating performance.

Gomez-Peña and Zaporah both believe that all performances start in the body** and also stress the importance of positioning the individual performer in the larger system to draw content from and feedback into. They join the wider chorus of artists who believe that involving the larger system in performance is inevitable because performers simply are part of a wider context (Zaporah, 1995.) A notable voice in this chorus is Richard Schechner who comments that “in performance art the ‘distance’ between the really real (socially, personally, with the audience, with the performers) is much less than in drama theater...” (Gomez-Peña, 2005, p.38) Contemplating this distance can provide performers with rich ground to develop performances from and also affirms the need for acute, detailed awareness of the performer’s body that both Zaporah and Gomez-Peña advocate for.

I plan to use the aspects of embodiment discussed in this proposal as a lens through which to reconcile a couple of issues that interest me as I strive to become an active video-based “tech performer.” The first is to consider my physical presence in the performance, the relationship between my body, the camera and other performers, and ultimately what this communicates to the audience. This challenge arose in both Shahar Dor’s Improvideo and Kelli Dipple’s Intimacy and Recorded Presence workshops that I participated in this fall. The second issue is a personal challenge to return to a basic, no-frills definition of technology that I can apply to my video work–technology as a tool to allow the body to do something it cannot do on its own. Referencing work of body-based performers such as Gomez-Peña and Zaporah will continue to be useful as I explore these issues in my practice. I need to locate performers who I believe have successfully achieved the goal of active “tech performer” as a next step in my research.

I also see a need to elaborate on the relationship between individual and technology in my research. In his foreword to Performa: New Visual Art Performance, Hal Foster claims that the performance art of the 1960s and 1970s was a reaction to the increased mediation of art. He goes on to state that 30 years on, performance’s relationship to media has now been reconciled (Goldberg, 2007.) However, after attending the conference Intimacy across visceral and digital performance (2007), it is clear that there are still a large number of performers and scholars who have not reconciled or actively reject technological mediation of live performance. At the conference, embodiment theory was used on both sides to simultaneously argue that the presence of technology dilutes the impact of the live act and that it heightens emotional communication (e.g. camera close-ups) and can be an extension of Self (e.g. online avatars (Sermon, 2007.)) There is an opportunity for me to enter into this debate through my proposed research. In keeping with embodiment theory, I see possibilities of the “individual and technology” relationship working on many different levels. At the moment, I consider this relationship as part of the exercise of the individual to integrate mind and body into a moment of presence during the performance. Technology might also be used as a catalyst to bridge the explorations of the individual performer to the different levels of the larger system.

Footnotes:
* This description is based on my personal experience of the technique as a participant in a 10-week workshop conducted by Action Theater practioner Kate Hilder during the fall of 2007 in London.

** My system of thought tends to be both emotionally and corporeally based. In fact, the performance always begins in my skin and muscles, projects itself onto the social sphere, and returns via my psyche, back to my body and into my bloodstream, only to be refracted back into the social world via documentation. Whatever thoughts I can't embody, I tend to distrust. Whatever ideas I can't feel way deep inside, I rend to disregard. (Gomez-Peña, 2005, pp.30-31)

... [we] tend to act with our attention ... in the function, intention, or language of an action. We deny the body its role as collaborator....In the perfect moment ... there is only congruent action–the body, the expression of the face and eyes, the state of mind, the voice, and narrative are all inseparable, spontaneously arising moment by moment from the same source of imaginative awareness. (Zaporah, 2007. p.12)

Research Proposal - Bibliography

2008-01-14T04:56:00.000-08:00

In case some references are useful to others for their research. I'm still looking for more good references (both theorists and artists) that deal with embodiment and technology.
Please comment if you can point me towards some.

Annotated Bibliography

Books

Brine, D. and L. Keidan eds., 2007. Programme Notes - Case studies for locating experimental theatre. London: Live Art Development Agency.
Case studies and interviews with key experimental theatre companies and artists (e.g. Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, Stationhouse Opera, Kira O'Reilly, Duckie) currently working in the UK. Most case studies argue for the importance of open dialogue and partnership between mainstream venues and smaller, experimental companies.

Goldberg, R., ed., 2007. Performa: New Visual Art Performance. New York: Performa Productions.
Compilation of documentation and interviews with artists who participated in Performa 05 in New York City. Foreword and Introduction offered an excellent argument for the resurgence in performance in the past decade and the challenges that arise when trying to preserve these primarily ephemeral moments in time for future generations.

Gómez-Peña, G., 2005. Ethno-Techno: writings on performance, activism, and pedagogy. London: Routledge.
A collection of essays which firmly situate Gomez-Pena's work within a political, artistic and cultural framework with a transparent account of his group's workshop and performance devising models. I was particularly interested in his description of "being" as opposed to "performing," development of personas, and how to pitch a live work when you are intertwining yourself with your audience. Also excellent resource to see how an artist explains his work to the rest of the world.

Govan, E., H. Nicholson, and K. Normington, 2007. Making a Performance: Devising histories and contemporary practices. London: Routledge.
Similar content to Lehmann, but in much plainer English and updated with examples from the last 8 years. Pragmatic account of history of devising and useful categorization of current practices that will continue to be useful when devising content and forms for new work.

Lehmann, H-T., 2006. Post-Dramatic Theatre. Translated from German by Karen Jürs-Munby. London: Routledge. (originally published in 1999).
Historical context for current performance trends in Europe and the United States. "Panorama of Postdramatic Theatre" section will be a useful resource for elements to consider when devising a new piece.

Zaporah, R., 1995. Action Theater: The Improvisation of Presence. Berkeley, CA: North Atlantic Books.
Detailed account of Zaporah's 21 day Action Theater workshop process with clear explanations about what each exercise is attempting to draw out of participants. I've used this as a key reference when developing the progression of exercises for the workshops I've led this past fall. Also instrumental in bringing my attention to the infinite resources for expression within the body.

Zaporah, R., 2007. Embodied Content in Action Theater Manual: A Practice Book for the Experienced Improvisor. Santa Fe, NM: ZAP Performance Projects. pp. 10-12.
Concise description of 3 levels of awareness that occur in your body when developing content in an improvisation setting. Of particular interest is her notion that we should always start content development from a place fully rooted in the body and be cautious of moving too quickly into attaching meaning or a narrative structure to that first "level".

Conference Papers & Seminars

Jones, A., 2007. Screen Eroticism: Contrasting Intimacies in the work of Carolee Schneeman and Piplotti Rist. Paper presented at Intimacy across visceral and digital performance, December 2007, University of London - Goldsmiths, London, UK.
A comparative study of works by feminist artists in which Jones looks at how the chosen medium for projection impacts the way that the erotic content and intimacy is communicated. Most interesting points regarding my interests: Schneeman turned film into a skin collaging cutting and baking it creating a deeper level of engagement with both the material and the subject. Rist's piece gains intimacy for viewer because it's on a TV which is a familiar object in our everyday lives.

Jones, S. 2007. De-second naturing: performance's intimate work in a world of terror. Paper presented at Intimacy across visceral and digital performance, December 2007, University of London - Goldsmiths, London, UK.
Simon Jones warned against taking performance to one of two extremes - objectification into a grand narrative or subjectivism and infantilism. A person isn't adequately expressed in the purely social or intimate. Performance can (and should in his opinion) act "as a gerund" in between these states.

Ponton, A. 2007. Eye to I. Paper presented at Intimacy across visceral and digital performance, December 2007, University of London - Goldsmiths, London, UK.
Ponton contends that new technologies are giving people (and performers) a new arena which extends how our notions of "Self" can be shaped. Also of interest were statements that presence and absence are no longer discreet states, considering the gaze as a form of touch, and asked whether we can consider any work of art to be immediate and unmediated?

Sermon, P. 2007. (Dis)Embodiment Seminar as part of Intimacy across visceral and digital performance, December 2007, University of London - Goldsmiths, London, UK.
Sermon presented his work of networked telematic video projects that connected people in different locations through composite video images. His current work revolves around a gallery he has created in Second Life. In all his work, he is interested in Lacan’s definition of Self and how that is translated into the digital sphere.

Workshops

Action Theater (workshop leader: Kate Hilder). September - December 2007, movingartsbase, London, UK.
Technique which tunes your attention into what is happening in your body at any given moment and allows you to become fascinated in that moment as the foundation for an improvised performance. Exercises developed to increase awareness of the body's modes of expression through movement, sound and speech and experimentation with motion vs. stillness, fast vs. slow, noise vs. silence, etc. Embodiment on the most essential level - moving your awareness deep into your body integrating what is happening in both mind and body in reaction to your surroundings.

Intimacy and Recorded Presence (workshop leader: Kelli Dipple). At Intimacy across visceral and digital performance, December 2007, University of London - Goldsmiths, London, UK.
This workshop revisited ideas originally raised in Shahar Dor's Improvideo workshop. Dipple also raised the argument that you can achieve a greater level of intimacy with a camera than you can in a face-to-face encounter "You can't do this because I'm a person, but you can do this because I'm a machine." Dipple also had useful advice to overcome anxiety about documentation of live performances never capturing the 'real' epxerience: think of it as "versioning" as opposed to documentation. Different versions of the performance that the public can interact with at different moments in time.

Improvideo (workshop leaders: Shahar Dor and Amit Shalev). August 2007, Chisenhale Dance Space, London, UK.
Workshop conducted by Israeli dancer and videographer based on improvisation exercises designed to establish a greater understanding of the relationship between the performer and camera performer. Introduced me to the idea of keeping your body "active" as a performer when you are operating the camera. Exposed us to interacting with the “larger system” by conducting several exercises out in the public sphere, including a day-long project in SoHo and Trafalgar Square.

Performances

Complicite, A Disappearing Number. Barbican Centre, London September, 2007.
Interesting use of video shifting between roles as character and set (foreground/background)

Filter, Water. Hammersmith Lyric, London. October, 2007.
Brechtian format which involved sound engineer and stage manager on stage for the whole performance. Actors were also involved in generating sounds and lighting effects in real time during the performance and I was interested to see how they shifted seamlessly between character and technician throughout.

Phillip Glass, Music in 12 Parts. Barbican Centre, London. November, 2007.
I was impressed by the effect of a technically challenging durational piece on the performers. It seemed inevitable that the performers would lose their place or miss a note at some point during the 4 hour piece.

Grains of Sound. ICA, London. November, 2007.
Classic example of laptop-based musicians in passive tech operator mode. Performers’ bodies were completely disengaged from considering the impact that their physical presence might have on audience members. One set was an exception. They chose to perform in darkness, forcing the audience to focus solely on the sound, which is what they wanted.

Further Research

Auslander, P., 1999. Liveness - Performance in a Mediatized Culture. London: Routledge.

Checkhov, M., 1953. To The Actor- on the technique of acting. New York: Harper & Row.
Julia Bardsley recommended section on the psychological gesture as a character development strategy.

Carman, T. and M. B. N. Hansen eds., 2005. Cambridge Companion to Merleau-Ponty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Jones, A., 2006. Self-Image: Technology, Representation, and the Contemporary Subject. London: Routledge.

Reynolds, J., 2004. Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining embodiment and alterity. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

Smith, M. and Morna, J., eds., 2006. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

From the archives: First Research Synopsis

2008-01-14T04:41:00.000-08:00

Current Research Synopsis 2007
MA Theatre – Visual Language of Performance

Primary research – The use of improvisation in interdisciplinary performance

I am conducting a critical analysis of the use of improvisation techniques in historical and contemporary interdisciplinary performances. I am interested in both how improvisation has been used to facilitate collaborations amongst artists and how it is used to devise final performances.

I am researching techniques of avant garde groups of the 1950s and 60s such as the Black Mountain College (Cage, Cunningham, Rauschenberg) and Fluxus event scores. This time period has had a strong influence on my collaborations to date and I would like to examine how these early performances have influenced contemporary performance groups. Contemporary groups that I would like to study further include Complicite, The Wooster Group, Forced Entertainment, and Filter.

Questions
- How are contemporary companies incorporating different types of media into their performances?

- How are they using improvisation techniques to devise a final performance?

- How have the early avant garde techniques influenced contemporary performance?

- Are there aspects of early performances not widely adopted today that could benefit contemporary practice?

- What techniques have groups such as the Wooster Group or Complicite preserved from their early work in their current practice?

- What criticism do the artists have of their own work and the direction it has taken (ie the impact of commercialization on what they feel they can produce?)

- How does my work further the tradition of improvisation in interdisciplinary performance?

Workshops
To complement my theoretical work, I am conducting workshops open to artists from all backgrounds to try out techniques that come out of my research. This term, I am working with simple exercises drawn from different creative disciplines designed to increase the vocabulary available to express their ideas and explore their discipline in a perfomative context. Moving forward, I plan to examine how the use of varying levels of pre-determined parameters or event scores affect interactions between performers and how different types of constraints can be used to create a dynamic final performance.

Secondary research – Solo artists with interdisciplinary practices
I would like to test out some of the theories I develop from my primary research as a solo performer. Since my primary creative discipline is performance-based video, I am revisiting the work of artists such as Bill Viola, Vito Acconci, and Nam June Paik. I’m also interested in researching Laurie Anderson and Meredith Monk, and would like to locate some contemporary London-based solo artists who do interdisciplinary work.

Questions
- What are solo performers asking/demanding of/communicating to their audiences with the choice to present themselves alone on stage?

- What are ways of creating connections with an audience where they feel included in the performance? Through non-verbal communication? Through technology? Are there particular shapes, forms, or perspectives?

- Should issues of intimacy actually be the primary theme of my research?

Outcome
My longer term interest is to form my own interdisciplinary performance troupe–not only as an opportunity to develop my own work, but also to create a support structure and opportunity for other artists to work in this area.

Questions
- What are the implications of my research for my continued practice? As a solo artist? As a workshop leader? As artistic director of my own company?

From the archives: Learning Agreement

2008-01-14T04:29:00.000-08:00

Before posting my Research Proposal, I thought I'd post the Learning Agreement and outline of research interests that J.M. asked us to submit to him before our first critical studies tutorial. Might as well let it all hang out, eh? I post these as is, without comment from the over-active peanut gallery in my head.

Aims (outline the purpose, scope, visions and ambition of your plan of work)

Research
1. Conduct a brief historical survey of avant garde performance

2. Select and begin analysis of 3-4 contemporary performance groups who work across disciplines, and who use improvisation to devise performances and/or incorporate improvisation into the final piece

3. Review the practices of a range of solo artists/performers who incorporate multiple disciplines into their work.

Practice
1. Explore an interdisciplinary solo performance practice

2. Begin to conduct improvisation-based workshops with artists from different backgrounds

2 Objectives (The expected objectives leading towards the learning outcomes of the unit)

Research
1. The historical survey will allow me to more clearly explain the lineage that my work is part of. I also hope to learn more specifics about techniques used throughout avant garde performance to give me a solid framework upon which to build new exercises that will translate well into a contemporary interdisciplinary performance.

2. Case studies of contemporary groups will give me some models currently in practice to help situate myself within contemporary practice, either aligning with or reacting against trends that come up. Focussing on a few groups instead of doing an overview survey will also give me insight into how companies present their work to the outside world and how it is critiqued.

3. Looking at solo performers will give me inspiration for exploring a solo performance practice that draws on my training in several disciplines, and ideas for engaging the audience when there is only one person to focus on.

Practice
1. Solo practice will give me another perspective on how the techniques I am developing for the workshops translate when applied to another performance mode. I will also be able to determine whether I would like to develop a solo performance practice in its own right or if it is simply a useful tool for a deeper understanding of exercises that I will be sharing with others.

2. The weekly workshops will give me experience in running workshops, explore modes of creative expression available in a performance context, test out exercises that come out of my research to see if they translate well to a group of artists from mixed backgrounds and/or are good at fostering a strong, collaborative group dynamic. At the end of this term, I would like to have a stronger sense of a good progression of exercises to use in workshops so that I can focus on devising a final performance with a group of artists who are serious about participating in this performance.

3 The Plan of Work describing the principal stages and timescale of the work

1) Historical survey 3-4 weeks

i. Determine initial bibliography and start reading (in progress)

ii. Locate any visual reference that could be useful in development of practice (ongoing)

iii. Develop outline highlighting key themes, moments, movements, artists that are particularly relevant to my practice (Dec)

2) Solo performance 6 weeks
i. Determine list of solo artists to explore further (in progress)

ii. Sketch ideas that spring from research, workshops & lectures (ongoing)

iii. Weekly dedicated practice time to try out ideas (ongoing)

iv. Outline themes and issues that have arisen from practice and research (Dec/Jan)

3) Group Workshops 7 weeks
i. Evaluate techniques from ongoing research (historical, contemporary & solo practice)

ii. Develop workshop plans for weekly workshops with an informal group of artists (weekly)

iii. Describe workshop plan and evaluate each workshop after its been conducted (weekly)

iv. Analyze themes in critique that has arisen from workshops at end of term (Dec/Jan)

4) Selection of contemporary practitioners for case studies 8 weeks
i. Review contemporary companies on VLP website (complete)

ii. Attend performances in London (ongoing)

iii. Select companies for deeper review (Dec)
• Access to information on group, documentation of performances

NY Times article on new video art.

2008-01-06T06:44:00.000-08:00

Fantastic article about some video artists that are grabbing attention in the art world. Ryan Trecartin is a YouTube buddy of mine who somehow found me shortly after I joined. He had a video in the Whitney Biennial a few years ago that was one of the few pieces that held any interest for me. The piece was 40+ minutes long and I was actually compelled to stand and watch most of it. So glad to see he's getting more press!

Anyway, interesting article and am curious to learn more about the other artists listed.

Hope this link works!

Group Show - The Hostess.

2007-11-21T08:26:00.000-08:00

I have this character who has appeared from time to time: The Hostess.

She used to give a lot of parties, spend no more than 5 minutes talking to anyone at the Club, make some great drinks, connect people who might not have known each other, and take people apple picking once a year for 10 years.

She went camping one weekend in the wilds of northern VT with a friend of hers. The Red Tent Flamingo Bingo showed how even a little bit of style could enchant the cast of characters who turned up at a pre-Burning Man regional festival.

And of course, nothing can beat a martini and bowling at Halloween:

Finally, she took it to an extreme and was forced to emcee a vaudeville night where she channeled Julie Andrews in a most heightened, low budget, camp way. There is video. I will post at some point.

The real point is:
The Hostess can easily become an over-the-top caricature, but her roots are deeply set in my natural self. I come from a long line of Hostesses (oh golly, is that another term for whore in this country????), who handle social events with huge smiles, open hearts, and a bustling desire to make sure that the guests feel like the center of the 5 minutes of attention that you will grace them with before going off to refresh someone's drink or make sure the canapes don't burn. Even now in describing the reality of this character, I am hamming it up. It's really easy to do. And I need to be careful about treading this line for the group show. I need to draw from the genuine place, and also get clear about my purpose at this event is.

How the Hostess might fit into the Group show:
- Publicity (could head out to other schools and give them invites)
- the Welcoming committee
- the Usher
- the Social Butterfly (asking questions, maybe too personal, of guests. connecting them to each other "have you met...?"
- the Instigator of Party Games (why don't we try making mommy and daddy go on a holiday in this diorama? oo! wouldn't it be fun if you could dress these dolls up FOR REAL?)
- the Usurper of Choice (just what do you think you're doing with that paper meat? Didn't you get a paper flower in your goodie bag? No? Sorry, you'll need to move to this room over here/you need to leave.)
- the Bouncer (OK everybody go home! Don't have to go home but you can't stay here!)

Lots of opportunity. What is appropriate for this 'party'?
How much of my own plot do I bring in?

Transformation into a performer.

2007-11-21T05:32:00.000-08:00

Contemplation this week focussed on developing my performance presence. The challenge of finding that state which is still you, but a you that has stepped into a different realm fully connected to the performance, the other performers, the audience, the space, the duration of the piece; primed to draw from all of this information and feed back into this system as a performer. Man, this is hard! And yet, this is what interests me about embodiment.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña describes it as "Presence vs. Representation" "Being as opposed to acting" How do you make a moment "real" while still being in a heightened state of reality yourself (aka 'performing')? Interesting also to hear him talk about this, since the characters that he and his cohorts create are quite extreme. Of course, his natural persona seems to be rather extreme...maybe its not too far off.

I also found it important to consider the difference in proximity to your audience when you're a performance artist. Often you are directly interacting with your audience and if you take your character/performance persona too far, you aren't actually working on the same plane as your audience and that could prove problematic, possibly not making the connection you set out to make. This reminds me of acting for film where you need to scale your performance way back since the camera is often right in your face while you're acting. I used to prefer working with non-actors for my films because of this-and the fact that the only actors at UC-Santa Cruz were trained for stage acting and I couldn't be bothered to tell them that the "back of the room" was actually right in their face.

Ruth Zaporah gives an interesting challenge/warning in her essay "Embodied Content":
"The danger of assigning a concept to a sensation is that by doing so we shift our attention from the complex embodied experience itself to an idea of a complex embodied experience." This resonates for me as I try to experience what it is like to be fully present in the performance. I often create a narrative in my head as to why I'm doing certain actions and this means that I have shifted my focus only into my mind, out of the rest of my body, the room, the connection with others in the room. From here, it's easy to drop out of "performance mode." I've been criticised of doing this and was able to see myself doing it when I put together the videos for my recent round of tutorials. The most staggering drops were the quick little glances that completely dropped the connection to the task at hand. This is going to be a big hurdle to overcome. Easier in video because you can just use the good takes and edit the goofs out! Also interesting because I know that this is at the core of what Action Theater is about and yet one of my biggest criticisms of the workshop is that I feel like we are spending too much of our time discussing our experiences instead of just experiencing them.

I was interested in Julia Bardsley's description of a 3-day piece she did last weekend which she considered a workshop for developing the moods of the 3 parts of a performance she is developing. I thought it was an interesting idea to immerse yourself in a mood/world/character that you are considering working with to find out what lies within it. Her description made it sounds like she had some idea of what the environments were going to be like and that the weekend helped her get a better sense of what the actual mood was and what the character was like that resided within it.

She also recommended a traditional acting technique by Michael Chekhov called "psychological gestures". I like the idea of exploring the gestures and physicality of a character, overdoing them, even, and then bring them inside you (embodying them). I imagine that the resulting character is not a clown, but the physical research that you have done can be tapped into when it's time to perform.

I need to work on developing my performance mode. Is she a character? I think I can use that word without it having to mean caricature. Who is this person that people will encounter when they attend my performances? In my tutorial today, Ann Marie Creamer thought it might be interesting for me to explore how I'm using my doppelganger/multiple selves in my video work at the moment. This might actually be an excellent way for me to find out what my performance mode is and how this performance mode might be dynamic without dropping back into passive me. Right! Active Me vs. passive me.

My own questions:
- Who am I interacting with in my videos when there are multiple images of myself on screen?
- Who could I be interacting with?
- Who would I like to be interacting with?
- How could the exploration of gestures linked to voices be more specific to a particular state of mind/character/persona?

next post: Group project - The Hostess

Optofonica

2007-11-12T09:43:00.000-08:00

Bookmarking for further research, and posting to blog because these artists are working in a similar space to many of us VLPers.

http://www.optofonica.com/artists/index.htm

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I'm feeling increasingly repelled by the stark, bright white, minimalist, futuristic aesthetic that seems to be linked to anything cutting edge in design or art that has to do with technology. In this case, seems like a weird aesthetic when you're talking about immersive, multi-sensory environments which are presumably experimenting with creating more organic technology-based experiences.

The Visual Language of a sound artist.

2007-11-12T08:16:00.001-08:00

This was a weekend of experimental music. Started on Friday with a trip to the ICA for the first night of the "Atlantic Waves" festival which was being put on as part of the Wire's 25th anniversary. Full house for 3 sets that took solo artists and put them together for live improvisations. Two of the sets had video. The last video set wasn't bad, (I got to meet the artist at a gig on Sunday, but for some reason was confused and thought he had performed on Saturday...). This photo below is of one of the artists he performed with, but I don't think the visuals are his. The image is more to illustrate the vibe at these things...

I thought the best set was the second one without any visuals. There wasn't anything inherently more gripping about the stage presence of this group. What was effective was that they chose to perform in near darkness. There was a little bit of blue light, a dull glow off the video screen, and the light from some of the laptops. This cut a beautiful silhouette of their shapes, which was nice to look at when you felt like opening your eyes, but otherwise clearly instructed the audience members to listen. Paul commented afterwards that his mind had wandered in and out of listening to the music, but when it wandered it ended up thinking the most creative thoughts. The same thing had happened to me!

On Sunday, we went to a church in Islington and heard more experimental music. Most of the musicians at this gig were playing accoustic instruments or home-made electronics (as opposed to laptop). They also seemed to have more presence as performers overall. Joao (the video artist from Friday) was playing a bell for one set and at a point, he decided it would be a good idea to wander around the church with the bell creating a nice visual and aural effect. There was also a double bass player who was incredible to watch. His body was intensely engaged in his playing and he had a manner to his movement that almost made it look like a dance duet between the double bass and himself. Particularly effective because the double bass is about the same size as a person. Musicians like this are what I think of when I hear the word "embodiment". He and his instrument were one entity and playing it was like breathing to him. I could've watched him play for hours. And he seemed like he could have played for days.

Don't have his name with me at the moment. Will update this when I do. Please kick me for not introducing myself and getting his contact info.

I'm need to briefly rant about boring visuals and lack of stage presence at these types of events. I often sense that reclusive musicians might think that video will allow them to get lost in the visuals or distract the audience from looking at them when in fact, the video is making the audience watch more intently. I've worked with alot of shy musicians and we usually end up figuring out how they could "hide" better, including putting a dancer in front of the screen so the focus will be on them. Now, of course, I'd like to work with musicians who want to find more interesting ways to deal with being on stage and work towards a sense that everything happening between performers, instruments, technology, etc is a coherent whole. Maybe it's improvised, but there's an intention to communicate a total experience to the audience. (Golly, what do I mean by that? Gonna leave it in anyway.)

Phillip Glass: Music in 12 Parts performance

2007-10-22T06:32:00.000-07:00

Summary from Barbican website:
Music in 12 Parts, a four-hour music marathon composed for the Philip Glass Ensemble, is both a massive theoretical exercise and a deeply engrossing work of art.

The score is the culmination of Glass' explorations and theories on repetition, and is considered to be a seminal composition that defined minimalistic music in the 20th Century.

Another trip to the Barbican without a ticket. This time I ended up in the 4th row ust off the edge of Glass' keyboard. I had a prime vantage point to witness the human side of Glass' work. I've seen a bunch of his pieces performed live, but at 4 hours, I think a major component of the performance of Music in 12 parts is the durational experience of all participants.

It was amazing to witness Glass lose his formality and get swept deeper and deeper into the rhythms and texture. And to watch all of the performers ride the waves of intense concentration, exhaustion, elation, confusion. Mind you, every performer was an extremely accomplished musician and/or composer in their own right, so the talent was impressive to watch in their commitment and competence.

What I found most interesting is the choice to perform everything live. Glass' music is often seen as being almost inhuman in its mechanical repetition and insistent rhythms. However, there were points last night where the musicians simply couldn't go on and for the first time I saw another side to Glass' compositions - the test of just how far you can remain in a precise regimen before the human needs to break the cycle (usually for breath!) The breaks, occasionally getting lost in the score, etc. were as much a part of the performance at the end. I haven't read about Glass at all, so I don't know if this is anything he's interested in. In this age of looping and pre-recorded playback in concerts, I'd be very surprised by his choice to do this all live if he didn't want those hiccups to appear. Will research this a little bit.

I was reminded about how much I think that Glass' music is like a physical object, rather than just sound. There is so much weight and mass to parts of it.

There are tons of people who will happily sit and listen to this really "high brow" music for 4 hours. Lots of folks even brought picnics for the interval! I needed this reaffirmation because I think I'm mostly interested in the potential of the black box and want to explore abstract performance. I feel like alot of the attitude towards this kind of performance has come from not having a chance to experience it or find a point of access to it. <-- something I need to find back up for aside from personal experience Having all that time in the dark listening to the slow movements of the piece, I had loads of time to come up with some ideas that I want to try try out in performance. I'm finding that most of the ideas that pop into my head these days are more about physical composition - set elements, fabric or costume, sound. It's exciting, but also intimidating because it's going into areas that I will have to seek loads of technical advice on. And on a totally humorous and random note: There were some guys taking a photo together and blocking the aisle at the start of the main interval. I was right behind them when the photo was being snapped, so I made a face at the camera. My partner then told me that one of the guys was Leonard Cohen. I ruined someone's fan "buddy photo" with Leonard Cohen! Heh.

Catching up part 1: artist lectures

2007-10-22T03:43:00.000-07:00

A bit of a "backblog" here. Want to get this all down before there are EVEN MORE things I want to make note of here.

1) Siobhan Davies & Shobana Jeyasingh @ Southbank Centre 7 OCT 2007
- Davies: interested in layers and the ability of the body to express internal processes like no other medium since it's all part of an integrated whole.
- Jeyasingh: interested in surfaces due to her training in classical indian dance. However, she too, broke with her tradition to find out what more she could do with it

I was struck by the difference in the way they describe their practices, coming from very different directions, but still feeling an undertanding and affinity for each others' work. I also appreciated Davies in particular, for her passion and interest in her particular mode of expression and the fact that she can thrive and be one of the country's most respected choreographers sticking to something as simple as "wanting to describe different circles in the space" (not exact quote) in her most recent work which was stages earlier this month.
I have tremendous respect for people who are committed to one particular practice and are able to succeed doing that one thing. There is increasing pressure to be multi-talented. This is a huge relief for those of us who like working across disciplines since I've felt that the emphasis for many years has been on specialists, but I hope that we don't forget to appreciate the people who have chosen a more narrow path and gone to a profound depth with it.

The other thing I noted was their discussion of the role of the choreographer. While the process of creating a dance might be a collaborative process, they both thought it was important to have that one person who would have a view of the big picture and make choices for what components go where and how the piece is organized in the space.

2) Paul Ryan at the Wellcome Trust, 19 NOV 2007
Ryan's lecture was on the semiotics of the sketchbook and the way that the sketch/sketchbook has been used more frequently in post-modern exhibitions.

I was happy that I went along to this lecture because it reminded me to think about exposing the process of my performance. My favorite exhibits these days are ones where I can see artists' process, or a performance where I can see the technicians working their magic "behind the scenes." In my artists statement, I make the claim that my performative video work helps create a connection between the audience and the performers because I create moments where the audience discovers that what they are seeing on the screen is coming from my camera.

Question: what are different ways that I can continue to integrate the process into the final performance?

Other notes:
- Peirce school of semiotics (do I want to read any?)
- He had a really concise, nice definition of semiotics - "how meaning is conveyed"
- Ryan, whose medium is drawing, said that he thought performance and installation work was less dogmatic than more traditional forms (painting, sculpture). The ephemeral nature of performance/installation meansyou are freer to try out different ideas whereas you've made a real commitment when you cast something in bronze. reminded me of McCluhan's "the media is the message" that Doug brought up in the VLP seminar earlier this week.
- the prevalence of these "private" works in public space has made them much less private. more self consciousness in the sketchbook knowing that you might incorporate it into a show later on. What would happen if you had some really private things that no one ever saw? How would that affect your work on it? Typing this question in a blog is interesting to me....exposing my thoughts that would normally stay stuck in the notebook. And yet there are pages and pages in the notebook that won't go here.

Prying.http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif

2007-10-12T06:04:00.000-07:00

Been watching clips of work by several different artists on UbuWeb today.

I've been struck by several of the pieces, but wanted to write a bit about Vito Acconci's video Prying. It's described as a video of a performance that he did with Kathy Dillon at a "New York University." My assumption was that it would be a pretty distant, impersonal documentation of the performance. From the little slice of Acconci's work that I'm familiar with, I should have known better! The camera is right in close up on Dillon's face while Acconci tries to pry her eyes open. For 21 minutes. Acconci is this faceless, mostly bodiless pair of aggressive hands. It's all about the woman's struggle against him.

I think this video is a wonderful example of an artifact from a performance that stands alone after the fact. I even question whether the intensity would be parallel if you had actually been witnessing the performance. I want to assume that it was as intense because of the dynamic that I know can carry between audience and performer even if you are not as close up as this camera. Presuming that's the case, the only was to transpose that emotion into a filmed format is to do exactly what they did: get in close.

My heart is still racing after watching this. There's also a wonderful breaking of the 4th wall about 15-17 mins in where Dillon's movement trying to escape the prying fingers knocks the couple into the cameraman and suddenly, the audience has been acknowledged - a hallmark of Acconci's work, but somehow more impactful here through that unintentional act than when he's demanding that you pay attention to him.

igneous

2007-10-04T06:24:00.000-07:00

I found this duo on YouTube through a video clip I found years ago of a workshop they conduct called "movideolab". My favorite aspect of their work is their use of quite simple projections onto the dancers' bodies. They posted this piece about a month ago and I think it is stunning:

The other thing I appreciate about their channel is that they have lots of video clips that show their process and experiments. Thought other VLPers would also be interested in this clip of a networked performance mentorship/workshop they did:

Blurb from YouTube:

Name: IGNEOUS
Age: None

The collaborative brainchild of Belgian multi-disciplinary artist Suzon Fuks and Australian dancer James Cunningham, established in 1997, creates multimedia movement-based performances for the stage, screen and alternative spaces, documentary photography, and conducts forums, workshops and masterclasses.

Igneous' interests lie in process, interaction, diversity, and challenging values.
International residencies allow them to collaborate with other artists and across disciplines

igneous productions: Body In Question, The Hands Project, Fragmentation, Thanatonauts (a "serial" multi-site performance & later adapted to a screen-based video), Liquid Skin. New work: Mirage.

Website: http://www.igneous.org.au
(don't think the website has been updated in about a year...)

TaDA!

2007-10-03T14:38:00.000-07:00

It's been a long day.
My brain is full and my belly is empty.

1) Complicite's A Disappearing Number at the Barbican

interesting use of layers - set, bodies, video projections
seamless and thoughtful use of technology held together by a talented group of performers
some small pieces that were neat, but didn't fit in with the larger movement and themes of the piece and felt gimicky (like the table viewed from above)
so much stylised choreography that didn't seem jarring
a full house! at a large venue! matinee! for a very non-traditional production! does it have to do with location? reputation? amazing.
there was something for everyone, high brow and low brow, visual or textual. there were probably points for everyone where they were really engaged and points where they were annoyed. and those points were different for everyone. as it should be.
rehearsal style challenging. not knowing what a piece will be until it is up and running and changing even then. interesting at first, but still a technique that once mastered might mean moving past (from actor)

Questions it brought up related to my work:
- Video as character/performer vs. video as backdrop/set/environment
- the human form placed in both these contexts too
- How to transition from one phrase/scene to the next? Does it have to be clear?
- How much information is too much? Too little?
- What level of control do I want to have on the final piece?

2) Action Theater workshop at movingartsbase - Class One

establishing partnership & group dynamics
allowing us to notice what our tendencies are movement wise (to mimic) when we are playing it safe and trying to establish a new relationship with a group
doing this without much direction
the instructor pointedly asked us "What did you like about that one?" after each performance. There was no negative criticism. Also was assisting us in clarifying what it was about the performance that made us feel it was funny, dramatic, etc. Body? Face?
eye contact between performers charges the space. I found each sketch compelling, even when the movement was simple or unskilled, simply from the connection between the two people on stage.