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.

Evoluntion of a Piece

Last night (Friday, January 18, 2013), I participated in a performance art event at Avant Garden and created/curated by CONTINUUM. They are currently in the middle of a residency at Avant Garden, with monthly performance showcases and workshops.

I attended their last workshop, wherein we were guided through exercises and eventually created "rituals" (broadly defined). I created a very brief piece that I called "The Liturgy of the Other."

That seemed to be enough to present something at this month's live art event. With little more than a week to come up with something, I revisited a piece that I had never actually completed: "Watch How You Watch (or: what do you see when you see yourself seeing?)."

"Watch How You Watch" was first presented in connection to a Fieldwork Showcase in November of 2011. It was a duet and Denise Wilborn joined me in the performance. We set it up as an installation in the lobby so that it was going on as the audience entered. It looked like this:

We were dressed in loose, flowing clothes, in a fully lit lobby, with only tape on the floor (with the name of the piece written on the tape) to demarcate the performance space. I had intended to hang strands of small mirror tiles from above to further demarcate our space, but ended up with time to only hang two round mirrors on either side of the square. They are pretty well invisible in this photo.

The Avant Garden, solo version of this piece looked like this:

photo by Hilary Scullane

Here, I'm in rags---a torn shirt, jaggedly cut off pants---and while you can't see it in this photo, around 50 small, round mirror tiles taped to my face and body (about 20 of which fell off during the performance). I got a few more mirrors suspended from the doorways to this small, mostly enclosed space on the second floor of Avant Garden, which the photographer placed in the foreground here. Here's another view wherein you can see some of the mirrors on me:

photo by Hilary Scullane

So, I hope these photos demonstrate that the two iterations were visually quite different. Still, I chose to call them by the same title.

At the base of the piece is the movement meditation that I have used with a couple of groups and that I try to do, however briefly before any performance. I call this meditation/practice "practicing resurrection." It's something I've come up with by stealing from a few people along the way, but I've "baptized" it with a bit of Christian story into it. Briefly, the questions underneath the meditation is, "what if my body were resurrected, awake, fully renewed? What if my presence extended beyond this physical body while maintaining its seat and being in this physical body?" In answer to these questions (and a few others I might ask along the way), I move, trying to follow the impulse of my body, in response to stimuli around me.

In the process of doing this meditation, I began wondering about the performative possibilities of it, that is, the performing it for viewers as well for participants. That it was purely improvisation, and improvisation of the most impulsive, unplanned, pretty much unstructured kind, I wasn't sure what the point was.

Then I recalled Bill T. Jones, in a post-performance talk-back, telling an audience member (and I believe he was quoting someone else, but I don't recall who) that the best way to look at modern art is to look at yourself looking at modern art. That is to say, what are your responses to the work? Are you intrigued? Why do you think that is? Are you dismissive or judgmental? Explore that. Etc.

So I decided to present this mediation, this exercise in new life and scars and eternity, as a performance, not because I thought people would "get" all that was behind the meditation, but as an attempt to start a conversation with its title. I admit this becomes something of a confrontational piece---but again, I'm not sure people will "get" that from watching.

Honestly, I don't know what people get from looking at it. I'm curious about that, but not my purpose just this moment.

Underneath all this is also my theological presupposition that we're all made in the Image of God, that the human body is intrinsically beauty, bearing the beauty of God, and the human body in motion, animated by the breath of life, is pretty close to exploring the movement of God among us.

So in the first iteration of "Watch How You Watch," I focused on beauty, of showing people that we are beautiful creatures and so I had us dressed in such a way as to enhance the beauty of the body in motion---flowing costumes that also, at time, clung to us and billowed out from us.

For the context of the CONTINUUM showing, I knew I wanted to take it in a little different direction. I hit upon the idea of putting mirrors on my body so that not only could an audience member look in the hanging mirrors to "see what they see when they see themselves seeing," but also so that my own body might reflect the viewer as well. I knew this would require baring more skin. Baring more skin would also add the layer of looking at my overweight, not magazine-cover-ideal body---asking the audience to reflect on what they see when they see themselves seeing a body that is, frankly, hairier than popular media like to admit humans can be (or if they admit to it, it's ridiculed).

To this end, I briefly toyed with the idea of simply being naked. I often joke that it's inevitable that I'll at some point be naked in a public space, but I also am not into nudity without careful consideration of it, not in a society that has a wide range of responses to nudity. In this North American culture, being naked too often becomes primarily about being naked---and this piece isn't about that.

I considered just wearing the billowy pants, going topless, as it were. This also didn't exactly sit well with me. The pants alone could evoke a martial arts practitioner. Adding a T-shirt or tank top seemed too casual. I wondered if I might find a vest somewhere quickly and cheaply.

Then I thought about rags. It was a bit of a jump from "vest" to "rags," but that was the sequence. I found a pair of slacks with a worn-out knee and a shirt with a threadbare collar, and commenced to cut and tear into them.

The result looked more castaway-cum-Doc Savage, than, say, homeless person, but it was definitely not "pretty." Asking people to look at rags while also reflecting their reactions back to them . . . well, this intrigued me. It felt like the piece now had a new level that the first version hadn't even considered. I felt very good about the evolution to this point, at least for the CONTINUUM/Avant Garden iteration of the piece.

I'd like to keep this performance in my back pocket, so to speak, have it as a piece to pull out at a moment's notice/opportunity. But this experience has opened my eyes to how I might be open to context and morph the piece according.

I think there are possibilities for this piece to continue to grow and change, both as a solo piece and as a group piece. I hope it's sooner than an a year before I revisit this piece.

(To that end, I should say that if you might want "Watch How You Watch" as part of some event---I can see it as a pre-show/lobby presentation before a theatrical event or as a durational piece going on during a party or other gathering---please feel free to contact me at neilellisorts (at) yahoo (dot) com. That goes equally if you have a workshop or retreat that might benefit from an hour or so of "Practicing Resurrection.")