Notes

How to reflect on my work this term? Write without stopping again, and see if more things start to come up.

What is freshet for me is the performance of UnMuted, so I will go backwards from there. I performed a piece, which I decided would be called philosophy, Pillow, Cow: Words are Just Jokes Honey, from VAPA studio E320, broadcasted live to a screen outside of the Student Center. The piece started with me already inhabiting a character, moving around the space, swimming between scores, improvising. Eventually I come to the camera and check to see if it is time to start, and, seeing the message from the stage manager, began.

It is difficult to reflect on a piece of work that in the moment feels inseparable from you, almost like it simply is you and not a piece of "work", especially when, leading up to the performances you practiced every single day, discovering what it is to enter that state, how you need to prepare, how to get out of you head or throw your head so deep into the whirlwind that you have no choice but to be laughing in a corner hysterically, smoking a fake cigarette even though you've never actually smoke one in your life.

The biggest breakthroughs in my work came the week before UnMuted when I came to the studio every day for no less than 4 hours, trying to reconnect with what it was that I needed to do, to be, to conjure up, to reconcile. I was finding a balance between letting go of precious discoveries and holding on to pleasurable materialities, a dance of conjuring up, slipping between, and surrendering to.

So what was it that I was doing?

I was navigating the coarse structure that began to emerge earlier in the term, of activating scores my friends gifted me when I asked them for help in making decisions in my performance. Early on, there was immense pleasure in the activating of them live with no ideas whatsoever of what would happen, and it was in in the repetition of them that I became a little stuck in trying to figure out what the balance between holding on to materials that obviously were important, and allowing space for new spaces, relationships, beings etc. to emerge. It was this back and forward that was one of the biggest concerns through out the term, and one that even until the very end kept me at the edge of my sanity. A little anecdote: 30 minutes before the first performance of UnMuted, while practicing and laughing hysterically (such was the character that took me over), I realized that it seemed better to do only HALF of the sores I have been practicing, instead of trying to squeeze them all in. Somewhere deep down in my body I new this was the best choice, but my mind kept telling me NO! You need to do all of them! I ended up listening to my gut (not sure which organ in particular) and doing only half. But I still remember that shaking feeling all the way up to the moment of beginning, as well as al the many feeling which arose and became one of the many drivers of the work! I want to be in a place knowing maybe 60 percent of what will happen, and the other 40 having no fucking clue. An at the same time, it is the scariest place to be.

Another incredible thing that emerged in that week leading up to UnMuted was this idea which, I know, keeps coming up again and again, and that is to move the body first. Move the body! One time I just danced until I found a place of incredible regenerating pleasure, allowing scores to emerge on their own, allowing my body to swim through them and to trust that it may not look like how I expect or want, but that indeed they are present in me, in the space, in the accumulated archive of practice. This eventually became the beginning of the piece, the "warm up", a pleasurable start of simultaneous welcoming, surrendering to the character, and actively preparing with ever cell in my body for the experience.

In fact, practicing performing became essential in my work, as encouraged by my professors, for it was really only in that space where everything seemed to come together. The camera greatly assisted me in this endeavor, as did FaceTime and Zoom -- I began to offer little improvised performances for my friends to practice performing.




And so, when I speak to myself out loud and cannot stop, when it seems that everything is part of the performance, when there is no wrong choice, that is when I feel like I am in a place where something good is happening (not good but, you know, the place I need to arrive at for performance).
What also started to emerge those

to It was during this week that every single day I came to the studio for no less than four hours, attempting to dance and find something that seemed to be working. Usually the best moments were at the very end, where the urgency of needing to get something done pushed me into a state of blissful disregard, and from that