Background
Yesterday I started my tenure in glór studio. Is tenure the right word? they are allowing me use of their studio space for free. (having looked up the meaning of tenure I have concluded it is not the right word :) ) Basically glór have allotted me time to work from their studio space a few days each week for the next 3 months.
I asked them if they would, and in return for their support said I would allow them to show any forthcoming new works first.
So.
Having connected with Tara Carrol of 4D Space a few weeks ago I enrolled on her 6 week Performance Art Beginners course to follow along via distance learning- she is Dublin based- distance learning being a system I have good experience of, having recently completed my MA in Fine Art via 3 years of distance Learning with OCA, UK. It seemed like a good point to start with re working from the studio. Yesteday and today I spent going through gestural exercises from the first couple of weeks of the Performance Art course.
On arriving in the space yesteday, I felt a little daunted by the prospect of what I’d taken on. Was I going to be able to do this? And though I have loads of ideas, should I scrap these and start again, here and now? I decided to get moving quickly (given my ability to procastinate myself into paralysis), so to warm up I put some bodyweight training movement patterns together and did these until my quads were too sore to continue.
Then I tried Tara’s Impossible task. This a series of gestures you develop from an impossible task that someone has to think up and write down for you. Tara suggested I get one of my kids to think up a task, and havign forgotten to ask them I looked up a sketch book one of my kids and I share to play a game where we make up ridiculous scenarios which the other person then has to draw. In this case I looked through the sketchbook and picked the scenario of a ninja fighting a robot, who is eating an icecream. The idea was to act this out, then break the actions down into 3 or 4 gestures and repeat them as long as possible. The idea was to last at least 10 minutes. I got to 15 minutes or so. It was an interesting experience as I went though it. Initially I was still feeling self conscious and a bit silly, and unable to shake all the niggling thoughts out of my mind as I went through the movements. I was stuck in how I felt I looked. Then the movements began to flow and I felt more physically comfortable going through the gestures. I began to focus on the rendering of the movements, finetuning them and making minute changes to sharpen them. I had decided I would go through the movements at least 50 times, to give myself a goal to work to and because by my calculations 50 times would be well over 12 minutes time wse and I would therefore have completed the 12 mins plus goal.
Towards the end I felt comfortable and although my phone (which I was filming with) dropped and the video cut out I could have easily kept going. I found myself wondering was I comfortable at this point because I knew it was going to stop soon so I was allowing myself to relax? So either way this was a good mini endurance lesson for me.
