EMMA: New Ground

Autonomous Community into Performance

I, too, really appreciated the time that we spent on Tuesday talking about our aesthetics, working styles, and creative wishes for the culminating project of this class. My instinct (which relates to Peter's concerns about the amount of time needed to make a piece of work that he is satisfied with and the limitations of a 10-week class) is to concentrate on a very specific element of my larger body of work and explore the potential for the tools we have experimented with in class to expand and shape it. Hence, the presentation last Tuesday of the solo material as a starting point for my continued exploration of interactive performance.

I also want to reiterate my interest in the idea of autonomous community as a collaborative model. While Peter and I were sharing our preference for learning models that allow us to spend a lot of time delving deeply into one idea from multiple perspectives, I began to recognize that some of my frustrations with collaborations in the past resulted from a clash of learning/working styles. I take time... time to reflect, to act, to react, to edit, and then to reflect, act, react, and edit again. I need time to myself - even in a collaborative process. Most of the reflecting and a lot of the editing happen in my journal, in my head, in a space where I can talk to myself, try things out alone, experiment, throw away and try again. Very often as a result of limitations on the resources of time and space, collaborative models do not honor or allow for work done in isolation. Collaborative lab time is usually thought about in terms of togetherness, multi-tasking, group thinking.

Peter and I began discussing a creative process that would encourage artists to work independently together. Imagine a space where artists bring in their independently created work (an installation for Peter, a video for Ashley, choreography for me) and together engage in rigorous critical dialogue about the work and ways that each of the artists are experiencing it as audience members. This feedback provides lots of creative fodder and productive thinking points for the artist, who then goes away and works further on her/his project, bringing it back again and again for more critical responses from the group. Within the context of these communal critiques, the community of artists remain open to (but never force) potential connections between the independent works: What happens if Annie retrogrades her solo every time she hears one of Peter's doors slam? Could Peter's installation change location at the end of Ashley's video? How does the music from Peter's installation change the quality of Annie's movement? Does Ashley want to pull isolated words from the text that Annie is speaking into the video? I think, perhaps, the only difference that I am suggesting here from how we are working is that in the "autonomous" model the majority of the "substance" is being created independently outside of class. The weekly classroom meetings then become time for critical response and the identification of connections between the independent elements that inform the next round of independent creative work.

For practical purposes, this may allow for us to make the most of our creative time outside of class. I am anxious to put in the 15 hours/wk that this class needs/deserves in preparation for this final project, but I am very concerned about finding those common hours between the collaborators.

posted by Annie @ 12:53 PM