I had a better day today, in terms of mental ability. I had trained before coming to glór, and arrived already warmed up and not unfamiliar to movement, so it was easier to get straight into it. I had given myself the jobs today of crawling all over the floor of the studio. Tara who teaches the Performance course I am doing mentioned that I should try taking up more space. I thought the best way to do this, to piss on the lampost so to speak, was to crawl over as much of the floor space as I could.
Before I did this I did another little warm up of gestural movements, again based around stuff I did as a trainer. I am starting to realise that everything I am doing is basically a physical challenge that I decide it is necessary for me to do. What am I trying to prove and why. Perhaps I should read my MA contextual study again, which was all about this :) I also left my yoga mat at home today, having realised from watching back the recordings that I was doing all the exercises based around the bloody mat as opposed to negotiating the space. I had forgotten that I wouldn’t break if I did the movements on the floor.
After this I did my mapping the territory crawl around the floor. I started at the periphery of the room , and worked inwards. I had to drop my knees down a couple of times as it was taxing to keep going endurance-wise. The smaller the circles I was makign got and the closer I therefore got to the middle the more my back and legs burned so I sped up, to get it done!
I also wanted to get a trial done of the performance I intend doing for the Collective Evil performacne night on 26 September. I’d thought about just spelling out whatever came into my head but on a durational level how was I going to know how long this would take? I wanted to see if I could make a 20 min performance and experience how this felt. I wrote down a poem, and my goal was to spell it out to see how long this stook. And how it felt to do it obviously. As I hadn’t memorized the words the only thing was I had to keep glancing at the sheet to see what came next, which I tried to do subtly :) I was focused on trying to make each letter very clear cut and well defined, and also making a smooth trajectory from one to the next. I have not watched it back yet nor been able to upload it as the broadbamd is dodgy tonight for some reason and I cant upload any of todays recordings so I will take that as a sign that its time to finish making the kids lunchs and go to bed.
OK I got everything uploaded this morning, when my broadband was in a better mood. I could only upload 1/2 of the alphabet body performance as it wouldnt upload to youtube at 22 mins, it was too long. I think 22 mins is a decent length to perform for, I began to get fatigued towards the end but in fairness I’d trained hard and had been physical all morning already before hand. I wanted to upload this at normal speed so as I can watch back how it appears in real time so to speak. Again I have to stop myself falling into the rut of being qualitative towards it- as in the questions I always ask:
is it interesting enough
does it look good
Instead I will apply Taras questions such as
describe the performance:
How does it feel?
Associations it triggers?
What is successful/what would I change
Relation of body to space
Can I see myself dropping out of performative mode at any point?
What do my face and eyes read?
