CURRENT FOCUS POINT (ONE)

CURRENT FOCUS POINT
or
How my practice will define itself without me confusing it any more.



Since the difficulty of defining my practice became an integral part of my every day concerns and after reaching a lot of dead ends (well, crashing on them would be a more accurate description since it did hurt) I finally realized that I may not know how this works but I know how it doesn't. It doesn't work by walking towards any pathway that sounds interesting because they turn out to be uncountable and equally tempting. The possibilities of what you can do to make this course work for you and your creative fulfilment (or whatever) are actually too many to describe and that can be quite disorientating - at least for some people.
Disconnecting myself from all the potential input on subjects and objects and focus definitions, I touched basis with what I know and trust (my interests, the always there - never changing - almost haunting me - interests) and this is the basis I am building upon. No more agonizing around subjects that may in fact be way out of my reach, no matter how enchanting they may have sounded at first.
I have been working with the subject of urban isolation some time now (not practically, just some research and a lot of attempts for creative thinking) only to discover that it is not it. More than that, I feel like I was out of my mind to think I could deal with that. No need for explanations on how and why I was excited about it at first, the point is that it helped me realise many things on how you pick a starting point that can actually lead you to the right one even if that is away from it, as well as how not all things work for everyone (common knowledge, I know, but I always surprise myself with the things I think I can do).
Let's get to the point now.
Keeping the "isolation" part somehow present since many subjects that interest me include aspects of it, I am going forward and I 'm humbly (wow) adding small elements from the fields of psychology and psychopathology and the unconscious that have always fascinated me performance-wise. Talking about that in details is impossible in this stage. However, I feel that working with one specific object that I have in mind these days will actually provide me with a lot of significant questions (the right ones) and the quest for their answers will supply me with the appropriate "vocabulary" I need to support my work.
The object is the mask I am creating. This mask will be covered with mirror and I will use it as the core for my experimenting with the creation of short performance pieces. Starting off with really basic stuff of one-on-one performances and performer/viewer role blurring, I am preparing something to try with you VLPeople in the next few days (I was thinking of doing the first try out on Tuesday if any of you is around). I expect it to give me some first info on how this mask affects the person reflecting on it and collect subjective feedback on what this makes the performer to be. Is he invisible until someone looks directly at him (already seeing metaphors in that), is it mixing the identities, is it significant in any personal way or is it read as whatever comes with it as narrative? As I'm interested in personal subjective projections feeding or filling or fitting in the performance, doesn't this object sound to be the literal representation of those projections? I can go on with questions forever but I prefer the experience in the short performance to highlight the important ones so that I'm not lost again! This way I can proceed by adding layers to that as steps towards the next short performance and so on and so on, hopefully getting enough to think about the needs, the gaps, the weaknesses, the errors, the errors, the errors. Trial and Error. And Practice makes Perfect.
This is a non titled piece. Titles and fancy terminology confuse me and keep me from going deeper. This piece will eventually provide itself with a title when it feels ready to do so and it might feed itself towards it's growth to something more complexed for me to stress on and audience to experience.
Practical work for now (finalising details for the first level of my experiment) and we'll see where that takes me.
My only fear is time and I don't mean my ageing. Can I have this ready for Tuesday while working on the group project too and reading my amazing new books that will provide info for the research proposal and attending lectures and sneaking on forums and preparing for tutorials and having 3 meals a day every day???
Yeah, I can handle this...
Cool.

Oh, as for my group project ideas or the couple of other bonus projects I am brainstorming on...well, I suppose I should blog some other night. It's almost tomorrow already.