Ideas and inspirations
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“You can’t buy a ticket for this session”
DERMA plays again…
Galerii U – Centrum Reanimacji Kultury
Jagiellończyka 10d, Wrocław
Friday, March 14, 2014 18:00 -
DERME at Wrocław Contemporary Museum
A night at the Wrocław Contemporary Museum.
WOLIERY 10
Friday, January 31 at 6:00pm
MWW Muzeum Współczesne Wrocław
Here are some photos from the last Derme show courtesy of Magdalena Placek -
DERME at Cafe Rozrusznik
Next Derme event: December 21, 2013 at Cafe Rozrusznik.
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DERME
While working on Enter Face, the performers were standing around looking at footage and someone said “That should be a trailer for the show.” A volunteer appeared out of nowhere and said I’ll make it. The next day we had a trailer. I then began to notice throughout our laborious tech load in and rehearsals this volunteer was always popping up saying he would do something and then he would do it. So when Pedro Ferrara asked me if I would do something for him I had to say yes.On December 14, Fragments Live Cinema Performance was performed in his apartment for a dozen or so friends. It involved super 8 projection, video projection, light manipulation, electronic music and some improvisational humming by me. In Pedro’s own words:
In a world of crossfade songs with no space for silence, we try to slow things down. A state of meditation and inner peace. Experiencing time and conscious of space, no rush for chord changes, no rush for new sounds. Noise is music, repetition is new information. In the era of sampling, compression and bit, we cross between media. From the atom to the bit analogue and digital technologies are face to face, questioning where we are now throughout rhythm and motion. We believe in sharing and collaboration. We collaborate with visual and media artists, performers, musicians and sound designers, poets and writers. DERME live cinema performance talks fire for the ears, wind for the eyes and honey for the soul.
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Enter Face Reflection
“Everything appears OK but with an underlying sense that it is all wrong.”
The stories I’ve been hearing of the world right now don’t have a beginning middle and end. So why am I even thinking about telling stories like that? A few years ago I was feeling good about making art, having a job, voting for government, buying a car, eating food. Now? All of it makes me feel out of sorts. It’s not just these precise issues. It’s bigger. And I think everyone everywhere is feeling it. There’s no going back. We have to fall in love with each other all over again, but it won’t be built on what came before. You know how certain songs can make you feel like you are about to shatter inside? I feel like that edge is right where we’re at.
“Underneath everything in your life there is that thing, that empty- forever empty. You know what I’m talking about?”
Using a creative language that was dreamt up 100 years ago (or 50 or 20 years ago) in order to convince actors that they really are someone else, or provide some form for them to fill or even to feel as though they have some internal energy or presence. All of this feels so disconnected to what we are going through now. Theater artists who work with a limited set of tools and vocabulary can only make literal representations of life and therefore be left out of the deeper conversations about art and culture and the truths revealed in unlocking our hearts. Musicians can talk in such fresh and abstract terms about their music and yet still make an album that is relevant and that people want to hear. I want my theater to walk that line.
“Man, sometimes it takes you a long time to sound like yourself.”
The way of searching is most important so I’m just going to throw away the expectation of finding answers and finally ask questions which are burning inside me. How do I bridge my ideas and experiences? How do I open my heart? What I need to know now is different than what I needed to know 2 years ago. I’m 33 years old and just now feeling the skill and strength to craft my own work. Build a platform of support. Develop a network of like minded makers.
The recent Enter Face project that I worked on as part of the Avant Art Festival was both the last straw and the final piece. It proved something that I have already suspected, technology is huge in how we make art. The digital revolution is having an undeniable impact on the evolution of analog. Seeing Akhe Russian Engineering Theater perform showed me, performance and art don’t need to be pretentious. It can be smart, imaginative, playful, poetic, and covered in wires. Hmm, now I don’t know if I’m making theater anymore. Not exactly, anyway.
“Whether you like it or not,
alone will be something
you’ll be quite a lot.
And when you’re alone there’s a very good chance
you’ll meet things that scare you right out of your pants.”
Being fired and broken hearted is scary and it’s also exhilarating. Picking yourself up puts you in direct relation to that bottom. I see the craziness of all my past fantasies, imaginings, and delusions. I feel the sharpness of how cruel I had once been in matters of the heart. I hear the echoes of my footsteps as I traveled down false and twisted paths. I can only make something big and meaningful if I’m not pretending to be someone else. Poland has taught me that all songs are sad songs. And it has woken me up like a splash of cold water in bed. There are roots here that clutch such dark and spicy depths.
“If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them.”
I do, I will.
Quotes:
Andrew VanWyngarden (from MGMT) in an interview with Electronic Beats Magazine, N° 35 (3, 2013).
Louis C.K. in an interview with Conan O’Brien, 2013.
Miles Davis, maybe.
Dr. Seuss, Oh, The Places You’ll Go. 1990.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walden. 1854.
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Enter Face Day 3
Update from Enter Face: This process is bizarre to me. But I dig it. Right from the beginning we sat around a table and talked about our ideas. Some proposals sounded cool or strange or interesting and it was decided that they we should try them and video tape them. We wrote them all down and then we made a list of stuff to go buy. The list resembled a material supply list of my kindergarten art class. String, balloons, confetti. But it also included fake wig, tin foil, potatoes, candles and so on. Just toys for our playing.
The substance of what our leader is looking for has been revealed slowly. He shares with us the video he has shot and immediately I get why he finds some ideas interesting and others not. He plays the footage backwards, with basic effects layers, he slows some material down or has the image upside down. There’s a teenage playfulness in how he sees and hears what we do.
After I made a video of a visual idea which included some text the project leader said “Now how to make it theater and not a film.” But what he sort of meant was how to remove the narrative of my chosen text (it was a Shakespeare soliloquy). On a walk from our lunch to rehearsal he told me that the institutional theaters in Russia who are doing Chekhov and such don’t really interest him. Some of their practices as tools could be useful and of course he would take work designing lights or implementing video for a traditional company. But I sorted out from our rehearsals and from this conversation that what he was doing would be generally labeled as time-based contemporary performance.
So we are trying to strip away the performance with extreme elemental / plastic / material confrontations. The research is about what lies beneath and asks if we can get there through the face. I don’t know where it is going. That in itself is a refreshing discovery in the rehearsal room.
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Enter Face
“Enter Face” with Akhe Russian Engineering Theater. Tasks for day 1: make a self portrait, make a list of 10 childhood smells, bring images or video that provoke the senses.
