Transformation into a performer.

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

TaDA!

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.