Daily weekly semi-regular performance sketches

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.

Initial thoughts on Nunning.

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?

Assessment round 1 site

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.

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