My midrehearsals crisis and some solutions

A battle of grey and colour

For most of this post I do automatic writing. I know it won't make sense from the first moement but I need to write it down. In the end you will get what I mean.
Take a look first to this army of playmobils. With its colourful enthusiasm and grey fears, ready for battle. The result is unknown...



I was wondering when that would come. A crisis I mean.
I have ended up my day with a crisis...
I don't know what I am doing.
I don't know IF I am doing anything in fact.

I had the thought that what I am doing is going to develop to a really interesting piece.

I was mischiefed.

What I am doing is a big shit.

I have just read a book and going to present it.
I have some ideas on how to make it performable but I don't know how to materialize them.

I don't even know how performable I want it to be. Sometimes I say it's a lecture. Some others I am thinking of it as pure performance, just reconstruction of images.
(I am avoiding the word performative...)

I watched the piece from an outside eye today.
There is nothing

Only complicated thoughts in my mind.

These thoughts mingled as they are they try to begin their journey to arrive to your mind. But heavy as they are, they never make it. They remain in my head.
What you see is my head burning of thoughts.
You don't do anything. You let me take fire.
Just like my yesterday's dream.
Prophetic you could say.

I love gadgets, props, technology. That's all what I have been doing.
An accumulation of materials.
I fooled myself. I thought that materials were material enough to make my thoughts materialize.
How idiot of me.

Why am I wondering all these? Why this crisis?
Tomorrow, I am having a presentation in front of my fellow students. I tried thus to see what I've done until now and how I could present it.
It's nothing.
And don't tell me it's still the beginning. It's not the beginning. I am working on these ideas in my mind long time now. Even in studio, I am working a lot of hours.
I just don't think I have the talent.

What are you going to present?
Yes, exactly, that was my question.
I thought a bit of lecture, a bit of making the space...
I can't play with the playmobils. They were the reason of my crisis.
I realized that I can't film, make the music show the pictures, show the video, tell a story at the same time. Technically, I need looooong DV cables (and even if i had them, I wouldnt be able to wander around in the rest of the room with meters of cables and a camera). Performingly (if it exists), I need talent (and if I had one, believe me I wouldnt end up in fucking Laban).

Ok ok let me take everything from the start.


Today I decided, as I had told you, to work on putting pictures of 9/11. I first recreated them with Playmobils, then put them in random order and made a story that has nothing to do with the real. Then narrated the story while playing with the playmobils. Then held a camera on my hand and narrated a story while playing with the playmobils. Then showed the corresponding real pictures, while the playmobil story takes place.
Complicated to explain. Complicated to understand. Complicated to do.
But I said ok, that's my task. To manage to do complicated things on my own, without the help of anyone.
I think the result is a tragedy.

If I do decide to keep up this part, then it will either be a prerecorded video or i might show photos of playmobil instead of a video.
For sure the live playing of playmobils is out of question.
I am simply not mediocre enough.


Which means....
Well, if we take the playmobils live playing, then the performance lecture becomes a lecture.
FUCK......

How did I make my storyline
I took some of the original pictures from the "Here is New York" photographic exhibition about the 9/11.
I then tried to put a caption under them. Remember that these pictures remain uncaptioned, unnamed, untitled. And Susan Sontag says "one day captions will be needed."
The caption had to be something obvious but not necessarily in connection with the real events.
These captions where sort of like little segments of stories.
I then put the different captions in categories.
I made a map.
I called it caption map.
Each area is circled like in a bubble and contains a small story. Different little stories were then mixed up together to make one unified story.



Corresponding Pictures and Tags





Some further research on performance lecture.
If there is such thing as common denominator or a convention of Performance Lectures then that is it's relation to the "I". Performance Lectures are highly self-reflective. "This self-reflective form of artistic practice questions the doings of one’s own and the conditions of these doings, conditions in this case meaning the predominant ways of producing and receiving" (Pirkko Husemann, 2004).

In the double framing (as a lecture and a performance) the lecture performance oscillates between embodying and accounting, between narrating and enacting, representing and presenting, playing and lecturing, executing and explaining.
This enables a whole range of modes of perfection and imperfection on stage – every mistake, every imperfection is automatically an reflection on the situation of the performance itself. Xavier Le Roy even puts small imperfections – like skipping a slide – into his lecture to make it more “real”.


Why does that happen?

Lecture performances are artistic bastards, somewhere between poor or conceptual theatre and minimal art. They show the impossibility of imitation, of representation and at the same time its possibility. It is this why the space lecture performances offer, is so often used for testing abstruse theories in a game of fact and fiction (like Marten Spangbergs “Extra Clear Power” or Sibylle Peters “The Art of Demonstration”). And it is this why the space lecture performances offer, is so often used for talking about oneself: The “I” is a disguise for the “I”; it offers the possibility of being totally honest and hiding oneself behind oneself at the same time. This is crucial hence it allows a distance to oneself whilst being closing in to that very same self at the same time.
(I in disguise, Tanzquartier Wien, 2005)

I think my blog is my Performance Lecture. The rest is something else...