Back home from the residency.
These things always get me recharged, and this one was particularly electric. This next month I’ll be working on the text for my first chapter (I already have 8,000 words, but still have a lot of ground to cover–so I’m planning on writing like mad for the next week or so, and spend a week editing what I have down–I thought I was done with writing workshops, but it turns out that Klaus’ seminar on Academic Writing opened up doors in a most useful way), as well as a draft of the 3,000 word document for the RDC2.
That’s the future, now going back….
Most of January was spent on getting my presentation ready, editing a few hours of video of myself, as well as video of the last performance. I hated seeing myself for so many hours of the days, but, I have to say, I loved doing this. Editing video for performance is something I rather like, but I’ve never edited video so that it would work like academic writing. It was much more labor-intensive than writing, but I needed the writing to perform, and it seemed like the best way to make this work.
A conversation with my supervisors left me wondering about documentation in a big way. Discovering that my performance videos don’t communicate much, not without contexts. So. It took some fighting with my own ego to work these issues through, in order to realize that I’m not presenting work, I’m becoming a researcher, so I had to force myself to start seeing my work as raw material for research, and this felt like a breakthrough. And the meeting with Laura and Debbie in Chicago sparked my enthusiasm for this, and I’m excited to take their notes to heart and work with a larger idea of documentation for the next project.
It is a central issue, I think, the issue of documentation in ethereal art forms (and I’m not sure it matters if I’m doing theater or performance art, since I have my feet well soaked in both of these, so that whatever this work is, it’s always going to be a little bit of both….and even more to the point, after I got home I read an article where Vito Acconci was talking about how Marina Abromovic’s work has become much less interesting the more she repeats herself, and he suggests that performance art isn’t something one can do for long, it’s a way of getting out of the habits of work in order to make room for a new kind of work, and I feel like I’m there, making that work now).
The residency peaked for me in the presentation, of course, because it’s the event that had the most personal pressure. I appreciated the comments very much, very encouraged, and also challenged. I like to be challenged. And it did remind me that, even though I wish we were at a point where colonial intentions weren’t suspect, the political climate in the world at large (inside my own state, which just passed a law making it legal for businesses to discriminate based on religious beliefs <which will target the LGBT populations, as well as those outside the fundamentalist Christian mainstream>, inside the U.S. with racially-motivated murders where the murderers get off, and outside the U.S. where police are killing citizens in the streets or Cossacks are beating Pussy Riot members with whips in front of cameras) suggests that there is, as yet, no equal playing field, so. I have to position myself within this work explicitly, even though it might seem implicit to me. I like Godard’s notion of making work politically, rather than making political work, and that kind of work doesn’t always show its ideology on the surface, so I’m working on articulating that ideology (the idea that no one is free until everyone is free has always been central to my thinking, because of what my parents taught me, and I understand this may not always be apparent in the discourse. Trials by fire are wonderful ways to find the knots that need to be untied.
Of course, I’m at a point in this work where so much seems implicit to me, and this is the best time to be writing my lit review, because I’m discovering that these things I thought I had already articulated are still unspoken, and I get the chance to speak it (with citations and footnotes).
Overall, then, my response to the residency is a very positive one. I would prefer New York City to almost any other place in the U.S. (because of the energy of the place, as well as the possibilities of making artistic connections), but I also liked the chance to be in a place where the energy of the surround was focused in academia. I wish I had been more prepared to take advantage of the conference, because those connections are ones I’d like to start working in order to start positioning myself for a university career. Oh, but I also really wish we could have the big, planned meals in more reasonably priced restaurants. The night at the Thai restaurant was great fun, but the night before was a little bit dreadful (and I was so hungry afterward). I also liked the opportunity to connect with the PhD cohort, and after going through a couple of trials together, I am looking forward to spending more time with them in the residencies to come. I’ve always wanted to blur the lines between MFA and PhDs at Transart, because I think we feed each other in remarkable ways, but I also am much more in line with spending residency time doing PhD-related workshops and events. We need each other to get through this, it’s stimulating and intense, and I’m learning that the experience of a PhD student really is a very different beast.
The workshops, then, were really just fine, interesting and engaging and relevant to the work at hand, and I wish there were more of them. To reiterate some of what we’d discussed together, I would like more mini-sessions, where we can spend time learning things that are more specific to our haptic experience (Voodoo Pad, citation, and issues of documentation, all of these I’d love to be part of).
Overall, I’m very proud to be part of this, working with interesting people, students and instructors and administrators, and doing what feels like essential and necessary work while having some lovely conversations along the way.
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