intellectual properties

embracing

in stillness pose @ Metamorphica drawing workshop, 02 May 2009
photo by Nadia Mogilev
costuming by Bad Unkl Sista

saturday night i participated again as a model in the figure drawing workshop Metamorphica, this time with Anastazia of Bad Unkl Sista as the designer/stylist, and as models/performers, we were doing variations of butoh performances, which can quickly be described as involving “playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally “performed” in white-body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion.” butoh is both tense and intense, physically and emotionally. to channel and radiate your physical, emotional, and mental energy as hard as you can is both a creative and destructive process. i love having a creative outlet for tension, anxiety, anger, fear etc where there is no expectation of propriety or beauty. it’s raw, and intense, and i love it. we also got to create/dress/costume ourselves from staz’s huge stash of butoh costumes, which was fun!

after standing like the photo above, my first pose, for 20 minutes, i was instructed to go over to the nearby chair and take about 5 minutes to find a way to attach myself to it with the fabric pieces hanging off the handcuffs before taking a still pose again, but while doing so i got really into this idea of creating constraints/tension for yourself, fighting really hard against it, and then finally discovering that you can just let yourself free. i kind of got into my own little performance – i was nearly sweating doing this, tying the fabrics around the legs and back of the chair, pulling against them as hard as i could, changing position, retying myself up, doing it again, until finally in the end, after about 10 or 15 minutes, after all this struggle and self-restraint, i stood up and took off the handcuffs, still tied to the chair. my skirt also happened to fall off at this moment, and i stood there, barely dressed for a minute, and then fell to my hands and knees.

here is an amazing watercolor from a later pose done by one of the participating artists:

all of the artists in the room were instructed to write one word on a piece of paper that embodied how they felt about what we were doing, or what they thought we were presenting to them. i chose the words “confusion” and “regret” (not sure if that means the people who wrote them were confused and regretful about being there, or if that’s what they thought we were presenting to them…) and so i stood for 15 minutes, staring straight forward, head tilted to the side, focusing on these emotions, confusion and regret, and i did really go deep into that for a while. but then anastazia came out and came up next to me and sat down and held my hand, and all the confusion and regret i had been building up inside, i let it go. and it was such a wonderful moment for me.

my body was definitively sore the next morning – i really did put a lot of physical energy into everything i was doing; i have no idea if that radiates AT ALL or if i look like i’m just standing there staring, but nonetheless it’s a really great experience for me, and i am very happy to have it in my life.

Filed in art, autobiographical, bay area gems, fashion, personal favorites, photos | Tagged with badunklsista, butoh, metamorphica | Comment (1)