Coloring the Line

photo by Hilary Scullane

This past Friday (May 17, 2013), I participated in a small group art show, called The Hilary & Nikki Show, at the Hardy & Nance Street Studios. Some folks from Continuum Performance Art were involved (most significantly, the titular Hilary Scullane) and they let me play once again on their playground.

For those who don't know me or don't follow my other blogs, I had a fairly big surgery last month. I'm recovering wonderfully and all is well, but being cut open from sternum to navel is a bit traumatic all the same. It's fair to say that I'm a bit obsessed about the experience.

You can see the line of the incision on my belly here, but not how it curves around and under my navel. In this performance/action, I drew the line of my incision on paper with a red crayon, over and over. Through the night, more marks accumulated on the papers. At intervals, I'd turn so spectators could see my belly.

I'm not entirely sure what to make of this piece. It felt somehow necessary to my own processing of what happened to me, but I'm not sure what I was trying to show people (and as I note in the blog masthead above, I aim to be a "servant to the showing"). My friend, Misha, tells me to rethink saying it's self-indulgent, which is what I've said about it. She wasn't able to be at the show (she had her own gig to attend to), but she said when she saw this photo on Facebook, she knew exactly what it was about. But of course, she's a friend and knows my story.

I put this out here on the blog to admit (as not all artists will) that sometimes I don't know what or even why I'm doing what I'm doing. Am I doing it for myself? For my friends? How am I communicating to strangers?

In another post on this blog, you can find a photo from Tell Me Where It Hurts, a pre-surgery (even pre-diagnosis) performance that I felt was much more successful than Coloring the Line. In that case, I took my own unease about what was going on in me and asked other people where they hurt. It felt much more expansive, more inclusive of human frailty.

But, well, I'm far from the only person who has survived a major surgery. Perhaps my processing this in public is an entry way for other people to process their own frailty, too. It's definitely more subtle than Tell Me Where It Hurts, but that's hardly a detraction.

The next day, I went to a performance art workshop at the Lawndale Art Center. I was babbling on about Coloring the Line and the facilitator of the workshop asked me how I felt about it all. I said that what I learned was that I really do want people to see my scar. I want people to know that, while I'm healthy, healing, all that, this kind of traumatic thing really did happen to me, that it wasn't an abstract thing. It's as solid as the line down my belly.

And that may be where I go next with any performance growing out of this surgical experience. In a culture where we don't like to see or acknowledge one another's wounds, maybe these thoughts will develop into something that will honor the concrete, real, actual scars, wounds, hurts---and healing!---of the onlooker as well as exposing my own.

ShadowPlace Farewell (for now)

ShadowPlace
a performance installation
March 17, 7:00pm.
The Photobooth on Montrose (on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose)
Houston, TX
$20 Suggested Donation

We're down to our last showing of the ShadowPlace performance installation. It's happened so fast and within too much chaos---but that's what it's about. The shadow places in the everyday, the beauty in the shadows, the ephemeral nature of it all. . . waiting, keeping vigil, walking a labyrinth that keeps shifting around you.

I might have more reflections after we close tomorrow night. For now, I'm going to copy and paste some reactions posted to our event page on Facebook . . . join us tomorrow evening if you can . . .

Toni Leago Valle: Belated response from me about ShadowPlace Sunday- loved the tranquil silence, shuffling of feet, the occasional sigh, all to the background of Montrose on a Sunday evening - muted horns, sirens, laughter as people went into the restaurant next door. I felt I was in a safe cocoon peering out at the world. You have no choice but to relax. Thanks Neil for creating work that doesn't look like "work."
If you missed it, there are two more Sundays.

 

Misha Penton: Lovely sunset-to-darkness performance installation this eve. The whooshing of the diaphanous fabric created a breath-like rhythm as the movers slowly spiraled through the space. I was particularly drawn into the performance's persistent tranquility against the chaos of the Montrose/Westheimer intersection with its bustling cityscape music: just on the other side of the glass...

 

Margo Stutts Toombs:I am so glad I saw ShadowPlace, again, last night. I love seeing light installations when they occur at twilight. From my comfy spot on my pillow, I could enjoy the movements, fabric, lights, shadows and the lights from Montrose. I wondered how many people passing by, paused for a moment to enjoy the installation and think, “Wow, I never noticed The Photo Booth, before.” From the street, it must have looked like a magical display window. Next Sunday (St. Patrick’s Day) is the last “performance.” It starts at 7:00p.m. Don’t miss it!

 

 

Showing ShadowPlace

ShadowPlace
a performance installation
March 3, 10, & 17, 7:00pm.
The Photobooth on Montrose (on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose)

Support our Indiegogo campaign!

As I've pointed out before, the line below the title of this blog is "servants to the showing."


What should I say I'm showing in ShadowPlace?

Shadows, yes. Speaking in general religious/spiritual metaphors, light and shadow vie for dominance in our lives and the shadows can be either rather scary or be the byproduct of very hopeful light.

I never intended this piece to be quite as personal as it's become. In the last month, I've had some, shall we say, medical surprises. A fairly serious surgery is in my near future, but that's actually good news when it could have been months of chemotherapy to fight an aggressive type of cancer. Tests and scans and other such pokings on my person over something like three weeks finally got me to a diagnosis that is free of cancer. Hallelujah, thank you, amen.

But in those days of uncertainty, I couldn't help musing, "And here I am making this thing I'm calling ShadowPlace, a meditation on waiting and watching."

Well, I won't go into all the many things---dark, humorous, sad, hopeful, scared---that went through my mind during those musings (and still are on a constant, present, playlist in my brain), but suffice to say, your attention gets mightily focused in those moments. My thoughts were scattered, yes, and I was forgetting things and thank God for friends who picked up after/for me, but my attention focused on things that might otherwise have been lost, ignored as insignificant.

There were small, moving lights that maybe magnified the shadows at times, but also made them beautiful.

And I thought, "this is what I'm showing---the beauty in the ShadowPlace of uncertainty."

I hope that's what I'm doing. I want to be servant to that showing.

I will leave tonight with a quote from a favorite poem by Rainer Maria Rilke. He gives us a musical image that I believe, today at least, is about the same tension I've found in my personal ShadowPlace:

I am the rest between two notes,
which are somehow always in discord
because Death’s note wants to climb over—
but in the dark interval, reconciled,
they stay there trembling.
And the song goes on, beautiful.

I hope you will come join us in the shadows and find beauty in the passing light. 

ShadowPlace Reactions (and a solo performance)

XXXXX and I enjoyed ShadowPlace. That was our first time at PhotoBooth so we were thrilled with the space itself. The piece was very interesting and the passing traffic and associated sounds are wonderful – especially in its impromptu appearance. What a terrific concept!!!  The lights and fabric screens and dangling fabric panel worked very nicely together.  . . . By the way, during the performance and because of its meditative aspects, XXXXX told me that he was doing some of our yoga exercises while we were watching, fixing his mind on his balance and breathing and moving his weight from one foot to another and balancing, etc.  I wish I had thought to do that during the performance. I think that would have really been perfect.

The above is an unsolicited reaction to ShadowPlace that came to me via one of the performers. (The author asked to remain anonymous, but allowed me to reprint this here.)

I asked to publish this reaction because it was so gratifying to hear someone entered into the spirit of ShadowPlace. I love the idea that someone was practicing yoga breathing while watching the shadows.

Another person in the audience told me that it took them about ten minutes to let go of expecting "entertainment" and got into the flow of the piece, the way the screens were abstract, absent of cultural or religious meaning, yet complimenting the architecture of the Photobooth on Montrose.

Sometimes, as an artist, you have an idea or even less than an idea, just an image or feeling that you're working with. That's a bit what I had at the genesis of ShadowPlace (see previous blog entries). And you know it's not a blockbuster idea, not an idea that will make anyone a million dollars, and yet . . . you can't be alone in finding something in it.

So it's gratifying that at least a few people understood the contemplative nature of this piece, in that place. I'm hoping more contemplatives might find this piece during the next two performances.

There are ways in which this is truly a performance installation, something to come upon while you're about something else, something with which to spend 10 minutes or it's full hour duration. It got away from me a bit and became a performance in a more traditional sense. Perhaps in a future iteration, I'll reign it in for that performance installation purpose again, but it I do hope more of you will come see this work, surrender to the play of light---both generated within the performance and the random headlights from the parking lot just outside.

Please come check it out. Bring your curiosity, maybe a pillow or blanket to sit on, and possibly some yoga breathing . . .

ShadowPlace
a performance installation
March 10 & 17, 7:00pm.
The Photobooth on Montrose (on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose)
Houston, TX

Support our Indiegogo campaign!

* * * * * * * * * *

Just a quick note about a solo performance I created for the Continuum Live Art Series at Avant Garden. 

A few weeks ago, a doctor told me that I had a mass in my abdomen. Alarming information, to be sure. Thus began a series of tests and a biopsy, but early in the process my mind was already trying to figure out how to process this, how to do something with it. I knew the next Continuum Live Art event was coming up, I wanted to participate, but didn't have a solid idea. A crisis in mortality seemed like rich soil to cultivate. 

After going through a quick succession of more obviously medically inspired pieces, I hit upon what I called "Tell Me Where It Hurts." I put on a blue, Lycra, full body suit, handed people a Sharpie pen, and asked them to mark on my body where they felt aches and pains. The notion was that I wasn't talking about my health crisis to many people (definitely to a select few) and that other people might like to express their aches and pains in some graphic way. 

It was an evening of occasionally poignant moments. While I asked people to simply mark and X and next to it a number from 1-10 depending upon the intensity of the pain, some drew lines to indicate where the pain radiated. One guy took my hand and drew a heart in the palm of my hand and with real sadness in his voice said he might never again touch the woman he loved. 

There were the less poignant moments, like the trio of inebriated young women who just wanted to flirt with the anonymous guy in blue Lycra. They drew hearts on me or wrote their name on me. I suppose if I were straight I would have been less annoyed by them. And there was the guy who drew a big X on my crotch, I'm fairly certain just to see if I'd react. My reaction: "I'm sorry you feel pain there." 

But that's the beauty of performance art like this. You take your risk with strangers and the mix is just human. And I have this blue body suit that is a map of one audience's pain, a reminder that everyone hurts. 

photo by Julia Claire

ShadowPlace is People

ShadowPlace
a performance installation
March 3, 10, & 17, 7:00pm.
The Photobooth on Montrose (on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose)

Support our Indiegogo campaign!

I'm writing this short over the noon hour on a Saturday. I'm getting things ready for tonight's rehearsal---yes we're rehearsing on a Saturday evening because this group of performers is just that busy. It's a little shocking that they're not performing tonight. I guess I caught them between gigs.

On the Breath & Bone Facebook page (go "like" us!), under the "About" link, I've said:

Breath & Bone will be a loose affiliation of creative people who will be artists in their own right, be affiliated with other performance companies, or have their own companies; artists will therefore be variously committed to Breath & Bone, according to the current project in production. Artists who wish to affiliate primarily with Breath & Bone will be encouraged to seek out other opportunities as well. In this way, we are all trained and cross-trained by the whole Houston arts community. 

This group of artists exemplifies this ethos to a large extent. Michael Simmonds lists himself as an artist and musician---and he's the participant I know the least about but hope to find out more after we complete this project. We have several dancers and choreographers with Cassandra Shaffer-Permenter, Donna Meadows (both worked with me on Jill Alexander Essbaum's Necropolis during my HopeWerks Residency), and Laura Gutierrez. Shanon Adams is all over the place lately, in dance, performance art, and theater circles (a woman after my own heart, really). Ashley Horn directed me in her dance film Wanderland and and now she's performing as well as making costume pieces for me on ShadowPlace. She's another one of those multi-disciplinary people to whom I gravitate: dancer, choreographer, filmmaker, costumer . . . and she was just this week featured in the Houston Press's 100 Creatives feature. And finally, a big part of ShadowPlace are these rather big fabric screens, which are being made by fiber artist Sari Frey (who has also had a long career in the Houston Grand Opera's chorus).

I hope in our collaboration we all learn from each other and take a little bit of each other to our next project. That's how artmaking is transmitted, it seems to me.

Now, to click "publish" and get on with the tasks at hand for the rehearsal . . . busy busy busy . . .

This is going to be beautiful. I hope you'll join us for it.

ShadowPlace Origins

ShadowPlace
a performance installation
March 3, 10, & 17, 7:00pm.
The Photobooth on Montrose (on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose)


Every idea starts somewhere. ShadowPlace started over two years ago.


I first started imagining a performance installation with large pieces of fabric and light and shadow almost 3 years ago. The church to which I belonged at the time had a worship space with movable seating, something that I wanted to play with. I pictured these screens with people holding candles in the darkened nave, their shadows thrown on fabric that was translucent enough for the shadow to be seen on the other side. Two people would walk around the screens, catching glimpses of the other shadows, but not seeing "face to face," to use a Pauline phrase. In this initial idea, the fabric was stationary. I imagined this to take place before the Wednesday night lenten services, as something that was simply going on as people gathered for the prayer service. Each week, I'd arrange the nave's seating differently, the screens in different configurations.


When I proposed this to the worship committee, it was decided it was a bad time for it, or it was deemed too unusual---both comments were made, so I'm not sure which it was precisely, maybe both. But at any rate, it didn't get performed in that space.


But the idea stayed in my head. And grew. I started seeing the screens move as well as the people with the candles. I started looking for other sites where this might be performed.

The Photobooth on Montrose has emerged, in the last year or more, as a place for the small art event. I eventually approached Simon Gentry, the photographer and proprietor of the Photobooth, about doing it there. He seemed excited about the meditative nature of the piece.

In translating it from a sacred space to a secular space---really a business space---opened up some possibilities for me. I felt less constrained to think it through too much, I was free to let the piece present its own meaning rather than my putting meaning on it. In short, I'm allowing this piece about being in an ambiguous place to have its own ambiguity.

This excites me. I think it allows for people of many religious traditions---or no religious traditions---to enter into the experience of shadows moving, light shining, people seeking, screens separating . . .

I hope you can come see it, watch it for at least 10 minutes---it's a come-and-go affair, by the way---and then tell me what you see in it. 

* * * * * * * * * *

I might mention, briefly, that we are not using candles. I love candles, I think they throw amazing shadows. I also think open flame next to light fabric is a bad combination. 

Last summer, as I was working at one of my occasional gigs as a dance writer at a NobleMotion Dance concert, I saw a section of dance that found all the dancers holding these small lights---which threw awesome shadows!

"THOSE!" I thought loudly in my brain, "I NEED THOSE!" 

So a week or two later, I contacted the lighting deisgner, David J Deveau, and found out what THOSE! were. 

It's all about paying attention to what's around you . . .

ShadowPlace

First of all, if you're in Houston, take note of these dates:

March 3, 10, & 17, 7:00pm.
The Photobooth on Montrose (on the corner of Westheimer and Montrose)

For one hour, for three consecutive Sundays, Breath & Bone/Orts Performance will be in the Photobooth, moving large screens of fabric and carrying lights, offering a meditative performance installation. The theme is watching, waiting, keeping vigil, hoping . . .  the medium is light, shadow, and fabric. It's going to be a quiet hour. And beautiful. 

We're also running a small fundraising campaign so the performers all get a little pocket money for their time, talent, and skill. We're using Indiegogo. If you can spare as little as $10, it'll go a long way to helping us bring this contemplative hour to a busy corner of the Montrose neighborhood. Go here to contribute.

Over the next few days, I'll be sharing the history of this project (I've been wanting to do it for at least two years) and telling you about the great collaborators. For now, I hope you'll put it on your calendar, maybe go like our Facebook page and visit the Facebook event page.