Final Project Ruminations

I’ve been thinking more on my final ideas for a project/performance and showing for the Alice Yard space to showcase my artistic efforts and growth through Christopher Cozier’s and my overall experience of Trinidad.

In our classes, we’ve been discussing the upcoming Proximities (http://aliceyard.blogspot.com/2010/04/proximities.html). One film being shown is Still from Que Te Vaya Bonito (2007), by Ivan Monforte. In speaking about this work, I was fortunate to be part of a discussion pertaining to performance. This is especially important to me, as I intend to have a performance piece attached to my final showing at Alice Yard. However, what caught my attention was the fact that Monforte chooses to call his works “emotional sculpture.” Rather than identifying with performance, I am more and more interrogating this idea.

With a few similarities between intent, I choose to make this intellectual journey. First of all, I’ve never done a “performance” in this way. I don’t dance. While this is no distinction to make, all things considered, it has played into my own ideas of possibilities and securities about the project. I feel, in borrowing the concept of “emotional sculpture” from Monforte, the comfort in purposefully policing the space of my artistic endeavor. I don’t mean to produce pornography, despite being nude. I actually cannot even predict what the final outcome of this experiment will be, but looking at the project through the scope of “emotional sculpture” has helped to alter my self-perceptions and feelings of safety and comfort, which are incredibly related to my subject matter.

I want to create a space to perform or sculpt that is bereft of an initial audience. In this, I do not wish to be catcalled, have a clapping audience, or the feeling that this is all for show, and not true to my feelings and improvisational motives. I haven’t planned a routine, and I can only guess at how the planned photography will actually come together. I don’t even know if I’ll be able to get naked. All of these things, to me, create the possibilities of recording a baser truth to my reactions and movements, partially in line with the concept of “emotional sculpture.”

I want to limit the spectacle of nude dancing by creating, in the photographic stills film, a distance between the viewers that is challenged by my body narrative.

This has been a very intense way for me to approach looking at locks and borders and boundaries, but beyond that, or perhaps through that new viewpoint, I have been able to more thoroughly explore my own bodily boundaries, constructed limitations, and the unique possibilities that my standpoint can present.