Notes

Dear HPI,
My name is David Guzman, and I am incredibly excited to be applying for your 2022 season. Here is my artist statement:
I am constantly navigating the space between dance and acting, performing. I need to reach some important questions, right? Right... so let's make a question writing practice, 5 minutes:
where am I? Who am I? Who are we? How can I practice partnering with another, without needing to understand them? What are the limits of empathy? What are the limits of consent? How do I prepare for the unknown? How to I lean into uncertainty? What if I want to avoid it? What is actually hapening right now, right here? How does me trying to name it to change it, and open me up to all that which I can't describe? Fuck the computer with its terrible auto correct... What are lichens? How do they sense the world? How do they experience touch? How do they experience time? What is there take on individuality/collectivism? What is a single lichen? How old are they? Do lichen even exist? How do I cultivate was of experiencing the sorld as lichens? How to I practice cultivating lichen sensibilities? What if imagination is a physical act? How do I create the parameters for a daily practice that I can repeat and commit to every single day? Why do I keep falling into stupors? What if my interest in cultivating multi-species eco-sensibilities, practicing gratitude for the land and practicing land acknowledgement as an embodied somatic question that changes all that comes after it, is not that separate from my interest in the wildness of improvisation as a way of not being myself, o fbeing multitudes, of tasting and transforming endlessly between unknown to me states, questions, leaking, the water body... so let's talk about that part of me a little bit. What exactly is it? It's a wildness, for sure, it's a non-stop singng speaking improvisational spilling of consiousness that agitates, an unraveling of the self, a a a a a a a a a a a um well I really don't know, again, very human centered thing, right? Singing, vulnerability, anatomy, fascia, touch, sensuality, sensation... I'm watcing old Soviet cartoons and just becoming all those characters and seeing where they take me... really to unpredictable places.... so yeah, um... clowning, falling, shattering, convulsing, transforming through song between very contrasting states... extremes exageratting everything, the edges, the climaxes, the tips, the highty highs and lowdy lows. Highdy highs and lowdy lows... and yes, I'm interested in some sort of narrative because I'm incredibly interested in character, in our raw emergent undefinable strangeness... letting those deep desires come flustering out, you know? I am very interested in imagination, how it is a physical act that literaly transforms our fascia, our tissues and sells... it is not an ephemeral invisible fully-mental process that is metaphorical... but very very physical. I'm interested in, I want to play, to run around yell and scream, to really go there, to touch, to wrestle, you know, to see and sense and explore I mean what does goig htere mean? To take risks, to be loud, to take up space, everyone taking space up together... to laugh... so you know I'm naming the outsdie but not really the inside... the yawn the...attention... oh why is it so fucking messy? I wish it wasn't... but it is. maybe I need to talk ore simply and honestly that I can't find language for it yet but here I am. With these two kind of different things I'm trying to hold less seperately and more wholy, you know???
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I want to attend head long theatre's institute because I'm at a particular point in my life, right out of college and immersing myself in lots of different things. I want to go back and experience the rigor, the community, David's mentorship and guidance... I want that hey you have this many hours a week that you are in the studio and something jsut comes out...

So honestly I'm interested in David as a person and artist and the questions and ideas he offers... about a lot of things. About witnessing, yeah? Like, just get there and whatever happens happens, and us witnesssing eachother is the freaking work... testifying space, together. Like that was so fuckign moving to me at a time when I felt like no one around me was even remotely intersted in that, like everyone was hiding behind video dance, video work, and I was like, hey this isn;t appealing anymore, this doesn't do anything, it's dead, it's not relavant right now... let's actually just stop, pause, take a breath, and see. That to me was so much more powerful and honestly harder, you know, to start from that sensation of really seeing and being seen, contending in the moment with the fear and desire of it, and working from that place, as material... rather than creating something on your own, and sharing it as a product... I work from questions, my process is extremely messy because I find that I am cnstantly pushing against the un named structures and values of a space that dictates how I shoudl be making work... well what I mean to say is that I want guidance and mentorship in my studio practice, that's something I feel I never really got at Bennington. We would get feedback at the end, at the showing part of our process, but not th eactual practice part... and I wish someone was there to say or just to witness me in that work... I also need to be held accountable, you know? It's so so so hard to be sel fcommited to go into the studio and daunting to go in by yourself... having this sort of structure would be incredible. Honestly this feels like the next level, that I never really reached at Bennington... that community, dedication, that weekly sharing and intense focus, focus as a way of inviting depth. Focus is so so hard for me, it's not how I work, and yet when I am able to create containers that allow focus, the work really finds a different kind of depth, a different tone, a different modality, you know? A slowing down...
So yeah. I see this as an opportunity to be in deep artistic inquiry, supported by other artists doing the same. I'm excited to, you know, meet and witness those who are comign from a completely different place, and as it says, how this immense difference brings us further into the process, creates new questions for inquiry. I see this as an opportunty to do what I need to what I love and want to be doing but haven't you know, have been struggling, like what if sruggle doesn; thave to define it? I mean it stil does but, i've been floating around between so many things, and I know it's cheezy but I feel this would be an opportunity to find myself. Like, here's my work, for myself, and I have permission to go crazy and fail and invest (for lack of a better word) in myself... like mapping out my artistic journey. I've really been struggling, and I need this. I'm thinking to what I developed out of Faye's audition... a preperatory practice, you know? I want that to go on beyond, every day... like what if I'm preparing for... for... for the work? You know? Preparing for the lichen, the land, the trees, the air, the characters, the memories, the slippin sliding grinding sexy spilling shit things... Gosh this all sounds so bad but I don't care, at least I'm writing!!!