I feel half gay. Not sexually that is... I'm not bisexual or sexually confused. I'm clearly hot for men. I just feel culturally half gay. Like somehow I've inherited or learned only a part of the culture, but not actually enough to pass a thorough inspection. If I was to try to board a plane to return to Gay Land, customs would have a field day before letting me pass through. Of course, I don't really feel half straight either.
I see the creation of each art work as a kind of birth. There's both great connection and great pain in this process, and I often forget that the magnitude of how connecting a piece is directly relates to how painful its birth can be. Last week we tried out a structure for performing a lot of the most salient material we've been developing in our Friend project. It's a difficult feat to imagine how to collage together all the
One of the things that is shifting in me in response to the recent death of my friend Sharon Mussen is a re-prioritizing of friendship. I had a professor in grad school tell me once that I should never direct my friends in my projects--that the roles become too confusing. Even though I respect this professor very much, that advice somehow confirmed for me how much I operate from exactly the opposite view. I love creating experimental performance precisely because
I was reminded yesterday of how helpful work in progress showings are. I often forget that this is an experimental form we're working in, and that experimental forms need actual experiments. While performances are experiments, they are high-pressure ones, and I learn as much, if not more from showings along the way. Here's some excerpts from ours yesterday:
For many years on my birthday, my mother would make her seafood gumbo. It was one of the few times I would ask her to make this dish and I always liked to share this experience with family and friends because my mother’s gumbo is an experience. It is thick, messy, full of crabs legs, shrimps, oysters and okra. We used to spread newspaper on the table, wear bibs and used nut crackers to crack the crab, the sound of
I love mysteries. I love mystery novels and movies, and mysterious stories and myths. I love when spiritual teachers refer to the divine as the "Great Mystery." More and more these days I'm seeing my performance work as a series of mysteries I'm immersed in. Each new performance project at times seems like something I've conjured up with my collaborators, and at other times like something much bigger and mysterious that we are entering into. I much prefer the latter
There always seems to be surprise gifts that come from creating a performance work--things that enhance my life and/or art making that I didn't expect to receive from the project. With the Friend project, a major gift has been a reminder about the joy of making stuff. By stuff I mean visual art (sculpture, collage, installation, etc.) This gift has come at me from two sources. My friend Sharon was a visual artist at heart, always making sculptures of various
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I've often thought about what it means to come home to someone. When you come home to someone, there's comfort and consistency. A dog's tail wagging, rich smells from the kitchen and maybe a kid slamming the screen door to escape outside into the air and wilderness and unknown. But coming home feels like too many slices of other peoples dreams. I get lost in them. They're flip books from another era and a different group of people sitting around
It's been longer than I would have liked since my last post. I'm in the final stages of "birthing" our Friend project, and these past few weeks have felt like the major hump to get over. As I catch up with myself and the work, I'll be posting some eclectic reflections from the adrenaline-fueled final phase of this particular creation process. Here is a post I started two weeks ago, when I felt right in the middle of the fire,
The showings that Dandelion has been doing as part of our residency at CounterPULSE have taught me a lot. Here's an incomplete list of insights, reminders, clarifying moments that I've gathered so far from the three monthly public showings of our Friend project: 1. Public showings are crucial to the development of the kind of experimental performance we create. They force us to get things together on a deadline, to try them out and then to retreat and re-tool. There
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Apr. 27th, 2024 @ 3:00PMEvent Detail Button
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