intellectual properties

movement studies

last night we went to see our (awesome!!!) friend Mary Franck’s conceptual-performance piece, Permutae.

i had so many millions of things to say while sitting in that dark theatre,  and now i barely recall all of the places my mind went.

i don’t know why i resist loving conceptual art so much.  i think it’s because i can’t actually articulate why, and so when, afterward, i say “i absolutely loved it” and someone asks “why?” i feel suddenly unprepared, embarrassed to explain.  why do bodies moving absurdly through abstract scapes to nonmelodic sounds cause my self to dissolve?  the body as vocabulary, skin as an instrument: this speaks to me.

all i know is that not long after the performance started i realized that almost my entire body was moving also, while most of the rest of the audience sat still, the man next to me fully asleep.  not only do i enjoy watching, i uncontrollably want to be doing what they are doing.

i have an artist ticket to burning man this year, from doing butoh with BadUnklSista for BRAF and such.  it makes me feel odd as i still do not describe or consider myself an artist. but i think that i might do a solo butoh piece somewhere on the playa.  i will not tell anyone when or where.

butoh and wine and tapestry

ras-Artumnal-portrait-2194, originally uploaded by furtographer.

from the BRAF Artumnal 2010 portraits by the Furtographer

recently

performing with BadUnklSista @ the Black Rocks Arts Foundation ARTumnal fundraiser 11/20/10

red strings and rabbit holes

“I wonder if I’ve been changed in the night? Let me think. Was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I’m not the same, the next question is ‘Who in the world am I?’ Ah, that’s the great puzzle!“

- Alice, in Wonderland

i love synchronicity, even if oblique.

as posted, BadUnklSista, the butoh performance group i often dance with, is doing a 2-night production in SF this weekend @http://counterpulse.org/ , a double-bill with The Carpetbag Brigade, an unlikely composition of amazing performance artists who are currently doing an extremely mad take on Jack and the Beanstalk. while some of BUS performances are loose, organic pieces that we rehearse very little for, this one was choreographed, and because i was back east visiting my family last weekend, i wasn’t able to attend the rehearsals and therefore wasn’t able to participate as a performer. we went as audience members last night instead. jay asked afterward why i so like abstract performance art – what do i get out of it/what do i love about it? (a side topic being that i don’t think people can choose what kind of art (including music) moves them. you can try to make yourself like an art form, but really i think you either do or you don’t, n’est-ce pas?)  i can’t explain how much it moves me, every time, but i’ll try.

do you have those dreams, where nothing makes sense, you’re not even sure who/what/where, but you wake up with a feeling as though you witnessed something so deep it meant everything? i have them often, and the Carepetbag Brigade’s “You Don’t Know Jack” performance was as such, with people doing odd things with unexpected objects, saying things that on the surface sound like mad gibberish but when digested, when it all hits you as one piece, as a whole, seems so universal that it means everything.  the poetic dialogue and songs were interwoven in odd but meaningful ways, the words carefully chosen, the physicality rich and directive, and at the end i felt as if awaking from one of those dreams. i couldn’t quite grasp what had happened, but i felt changed by it.

and then, Bad Unkl Sista’s performance, which i won’t even attempt with the details. most prominently, I am completely in love with Totter Todd‘s music right now (the dark place inside that you act from but never look at/swallow your fear, swallow it whole/you’re killing yourself with your own beauty).  BUS performances are always an honest and intense look at that which we are, the pieces of ourselves which we hide, which we let eat us from the inside, and the joy at relieving ourselves from such self-inflicted prisons.  there’s a certain part of myself that i am really not liking these days (in short: judgmental, and vocally), which is often exacerbated by visiting my family, and the performance last night brought a lot of that to the surface.  i am thinking i need a long strand of red string to tie around my wrist as a reminder of a few things i need to work on for a while (in the performance, such a string was used as a representation of your fear(s), which it is suggested in both song and action that you ingest, digest, and then regurgitate into something that tastes like relief).

thank you Bad Unkl Sista for always bringing such beauty, whether i am inside it or watching from afar. there’s another performance tonight @counterpulse in SF, which i’m sure will be similar but different. if you like intensity and songs and dances and abstract dreams that seem to say almost nothing directly but mean everything, i highly encourage you to attend tonight.

what does this have to do with rabbit holes and synchronicity?  the new Alice in Wonderland opened in SF this weekend, and we have a large crew (30+) who will be going to see it tonight, many of us in costume. and while the Disney version is just fine, those who have read the original texts know that Alice in Wonderland/Through the Looking Glass are much more than childrens’ stories, and are quite philosophically intricate and more than a little bit metaphysical.  it’s obvious why the psychedelic community latched onto its metaphors.

so with all the anticipation for the new film and mind wandering in that direction for this past week, particularly visiting my mother, who has an enormous collection of Alice in Wonderland memorabilia in her dining room/living room cabinets (indeed: dolls and figurines and books and all sorts of collectors items), walking out of the performance last night felt like the start of a weekend-long visit down the rabbit hole. then after another night of intense, crazy dreams, waking up this morning, it’s true: i’m really not sure i am the same person i was when i went to sleep last night, and if not, who that means i am today.

butoh

i never imagined i’d perform butoh before i did it. sometimes i see myself dong this crazy thing, this macabre expression, this walking slowly with fists clenched looking as though in anguish and/or frozen joy, face painted white and knees trembling, this shamelessly raw unfettered expression, this adoration of the self. who would want or need this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Butoh

the workshop i did last weekend involved walking really, really slowly across a room but maintaining intense presence, resistance activities with partners (e.g. pushing eachother backward as hard as you can),
imagining an object is the physical manifestation of everything good about yourself and offering it to others (projection), imaging an object is everything bad about yourself and sharing it with others,

running ecstatically, using breath to create energy waves in the body.

i know it might sound silly, but think about it: it’s the kinds of things you might have done as a small child, games to play with yourself and others, and don’t do anymore.  it feels good.

also: it can be physically intense. i was sore for 3 days after last weekend. but it doesn’t have to be.  you can take it easy on yourself too.

there is a free workshop this weekend in SoMa SF.  if you are interested, let me know, and i will point you the way.

Bad Unkl Sista is offering free introductory butoh and multi-genre performance training for anyone interested…no performance or dance skills required…the only thing required is a desire to see yourself and others from a different angle..

http://www.badunklsista.com

line cook philosopher + the spiders in our minds, halloween 2009

i have found myself passing this one to a few people over the past couple of days, for distinctly different reasons, and it also relates much to how and why i do the kind of performance art it do, so figure i might as well share it with everyone: Continue reading »

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.

creepy doll

last night i was invited to be a roaming performer at Supperclub SF with my friend Antastazia of badunklsista. Supperclub is this “dining experience” sort of thing where you go in for a prix fixe meal, sit in a huge white room full of huge white beds and huge white pillows instead of tables, atmospherically lit with all kinds of colorful lights and there’s a DJ and guests are entertained between courses by various local performance acts. even though it’s been around for a while and several of my friends have performed/worked there, i went there for the first time myself just last month cuz it’s pricey to just go as a customer.

i’ve now done lots of “fashion shows”/performances with anastazia, but more than a clothing constructor (which is just sort of happenstance and out of utility), she’s first and foremost a performance artist of the most devious kind. she’s on staff of supperclub as a creative contributor, and this week she was in charge of entertainment, so some of us were invited to come and costume ourselves and see what we could do; i don’t have any real specific talent like singing or dancing, so we were to just “play” with the crowd and provide distraction/ambiance.

i adorned myself in one of staz’s fabulous costumes (no photos, unfortunately) and thought about what it was i felt like doing. it wasn’t until i put on my enormous fake eyelashes that i really started to get a vibe for my character. i have pretty big eyes to begin with, and these things make them HUGE. staz encouraged us that if we were going to communicate with patrons verbally, we should make up a language. i figured that would be too hard, and so determined that i would communicate only with my enormous eyes.

the crowd last night was a private event crowd without dinner – so more of a stand-around-and-drink event than the usual thing where people sit down on the beds and are served a 5 course meal. this made it a bit difficult, as most of them were not really paying attention to the performers and just talking to eachother. you sort of had to make them pay attention to you, as opposed to regular nights where the performers are staged to go on between courses and pretty much everyone watches from their beds. that, and they were all gamers. tech nerds. who, you might think would appreciate some anime-style performance art, but it seems they didn’t really know how to engage a human form of the type of game characters they develop. many of them, when approached, would quickly turn and walk away.

i determined that, outside of just looking like a freak, obsessive and childlike object worship was the best way to create my non-verbal character. first, i obtained a glass of champagne. i then went around the room and the bar, staring widely, sort of caressing my champagne flute, and non-verbally communicating with everyone that i was EXTREMELY interested in having my glass toast their glass – as if i were an alien who had just discovered this human custom and with a bit of misinterpretation about what it is – by STARING at their glass and slowing reaching mine out toward them. once they got it and clinked me, i would look up, half-smile, look them right in the eye, and blink my false eyelashes dramatically, slowly, hold for a couple of seconds, and then immediately focus on the next glass in proximity. repeat. all the way around the room of about 100 people, skipping only those who refused to acknowledge my presence. i found that most people are pretty much freaked out simply by anyone who looks at them directly in the eye, particularly if you’re not saying anything. i also sort of had that creepy clown/mime/doll vibe, which i know a lot of people don’t really like.

after toasting everyone, i obtained the next object, which was a heart-shaped bird cage with a animal pelt inside. i proceeded back around the room, silently, holding out the cage to everyone, making dramatic eyes and motions as if this was an extremely important pet inside this cage. i petted it. i encouraged them to pet it. to touch the cage. to examine the inside.

then, i found a large silver mirror ball with the word ‘BAD’ etched into one side and ‘ESP’ on the other. i used the ball sort of like an 8-ball, rolling it around in my hands, walking up to people, looking them in the eye for a moment, and then showing them either the BAD or ESP side, or, sometimes both, nodding knowingly and blinking a lot when they seemed to get it.

at one point, the other performers had all left the room for a break/drink/change of costume and i was the only one left for a few minutes. i was a bit uncomfortable at first, being the only freak in the room and having sort of exhausted all the prop games i could come up with. i eventually gave myself a task, and that was to build a sort of altar in the middle of the room out of the various pillows and props that had been strewn around the room by our troupe, first placing the precious birdcage on a pillow, then covering it, as you do with a bird when you want it to go to sleep, then surrounding it with a pyramid of pillows, and placing some decor and the mirror ball on top. i spent about 10 minutes doing this, slowly and with great consternation and concentration, inspecting each piece and rearranging over and over again. it wasn’t anything spectacular – it was more like something you’d discover your 5 year old doing while bored in their bedroom on a rainy day – but it was doing something, and people were watching. i did all i could with building my pillow pyramid/altar, and after admiring it and looking as though i had achieved great satisfaction, i turned and left the room.

all in all, i think i did a pretty good job. i’m generally very social, but i don’t necessarily like being the center of attention. i generally have stage fright, especially if asked to speak, and so this was a great combination of do-whatever-and-do-it-silently, with little or no pressure to do much except to keep doing something weird. i enjoyed the one-to-one interaction intention i set out with, as opposed to just sort of wandering around and dancing and not engaging people, and i think, outside of the few people who looked really uncomfortable when approached, it got people more interested in us as characters and engaged in the scene instead of just treating it like another night out at the bar in SF.

i’m most likely going back again tomorrow night to do it again, although for a shorter period as i have somewhere to be by 10:00. i’m not sure if i’ll do the same, or be even braver and try to create an even more odd character for myself. we’ll see, but all in all it was a fun experience and a good exercise in both creativity and boldness for me, as opposed to being prescribed a character and put onto a stage and not having to really engage. i do however, know that i could never do such a thing night after night, as a career. performing is stressful and draining, not to mention how jaded one can get by having to interact with ungrateful and/or uninterested audiences, and i think i’d burn out waaay too fast on this sort of thing, but being a total sideshow freak now and then is really quite gratifying and an excellent outlet for all kinds of emotions and desires, and a way to let some of the weird parts of your personality out to breathe for a bit. i know some people like to do that everyday, but if you’re a permanent freak, doesn’t that just become normal for you? i like switching between modes.

butoh v. booty

sharona, orange, me
right click for full

following a lengthy string of booty fashion on the runway (underpants & pumps), anastazia & f’kir lead the finale de resistance with a butoh performance and then, similar to our performance last month @ DNA lounge, the miranda caroligne women in black came out with our clothes on hangers and blood-stained hands & freaked some people out. it was good. particularly since the cattiness of the other 30+ models getting ready backstage was irresistably industry-stereotypical (and amusing), it felt good to come out and do something rather juxtaposed after them.
–jay’s photos
–sharona’s