Body Talks (Mind, Bodies & Thoughts)

A Simple Case of Re-Interpretation? (2/2)

That I tried for almost an hour to become a woman only to miserably fail as soon as my nude body was unveiled. Needless to say that, as the performance was seen as a dance piece right from the start, the choreography was then to blame as was my deliberate choice to go nude towards the end of the show.

I didn’t take these comments gladly. I couldn’t understand them. I couldn’t understand how an audience decided that my quest to be a woman has failed only because I showed the undoubtable sign of the opposite sex. I couldn’t understand how a critic decided I failed in embracing my womanhood because this N factor. I couldn’t understand how a fellow artist decided I didn’t know what Women were really about because Kylie, Madonna or Vanessa Paradis were not “real” women in his eyes. Most importantly I couldn’t understand how everybody failed to recognize that my quest had nothing to do with being, or wanting to be a woman but with wanting my (lost) femininity…In my mind, only question stuck again and agin: How can femininity and womanhood be perceived as being the same? Is it because the former was explored by a man? On that occasion by a male dancer? Is it that easy to think whoever, from the opposite sex, explores his feminine side is trying to be a woman? Is it a genuine general consensus? Or was I facing underneath the same kind of criticism some unexpected stereotypical views on gender(s)?

If I had, at the time, been able to get over the personal & professional anger with the failure of the piece, I’d have enjoyed the guessing game as which gender is the target of this confusion between femininity & womanhood – And perhaps I will play it at some point – but I wasn’t even objective enough to understand why Women In Me collapsed…It took me months to see the wounds here and there until this impulsive moment of realization that the only cause of its failure was me I never gave the piece a chance to be born. I never gave myself a chance to work on it. I was fighting it from the very start and so I refused to recognize its challenge at every level – intellectual, personal, physical. But I also underestimated the strong impact of my opposition to the piece. It wasn’t even a case of denying, I was totally oblivious to the fact I didn’t want to make the piece.

Yes, I was pretty certain my femininity has gone lost and indeed I genuinely wanted to try to reconnect with it. But I didn’t know it was the wrong time. I wasn’t ready to be exposed that way, to show vulnerability, to show my inner struggles, to reveal some uncertainties about my quest, to be judged on my artistic expession and not having any protection, I wasn’t ready to be that person again. All I wanted was to be a man! To feel like a (stereotypical) man! To show off the strength of my physicality, to exhibit my confident masculinity, to show power, control from my body. I wasn’t there (on stage) to make a statement about my body or acceptance. I was there to impose myself, a stereotype-free male dancer, to the audience. And Women In Me, in the process, never recovered from this.

So I played it safe all along, devising a piece to its strict minimum and blaming its difficult process on my internal turmoil. And now I feel like there’s no escape from it. It’s not about making a better piece nor to prove a point (to myself). It’s about filling an artistic void and so taking on the challenge of (re-)defining femininity in A man, through my dancing body, questioning my own understanding of femininity and exposing with confidence my fear of destabilizing my sense of identity.

This is the first step towards the decision to remake the piece. A small but significant step. have yet to let the thought process take the lead & put me in the right direction…Another post of discussion.

A simple case of re-interpretation? (1/2)

I’ve never redone before a piece of work that has already been showed. I had restaged an existing production months after its debut and even if some changes were made, some new ideas explored and used, the final version of the show remained pretty much the same. This period of refining, as I call it, only benefited the show. It ran smoother, felt tighter and its message sounded much clearer. It also showed a real progression in my approach to (experimental) Theatre which made that experience even more satisfying. But that was an exception. When it comes to my performance work, as they say, when its done it’s done and what it’s done cannot be undone. I suppose, if I allow myself to digress a little, this rule was the starting point, which took me a while to be aware of, of my transtion from being a Theatre director experimenting with other art forms to challenge the conventions of the genre within my productions to establishing myself as a performance artist who intends to use movement as a base to create my pieces. Unfortunately at the time of that piece I’m thinking of redoing, I was in total limbo, pushing my limits, my patience and faith in my creativity not to give up altogether. It was a chaotic time to say the least, and the fact I didn’t know anymore what my practice was about only added to the frustration about the piece. On paper, the rules of the game were basic. It’s a dance piece, I was the choreographer and the performer. In reality, applying the rules were rather complex. Although, I was willing to work on the choreography, I wasn’t very interested in making dance in the conventional sense. I was not interested in rehearsing the moves I found over and over to make sure they stay in my body as it found them. As I created them I wanted to perform them here and then. Fresh. Raw. With (hopefully) power. I was getting into trouble. But that was only the tip to the iceberg…

So as they say: what is done is done and cannot be undone! Therefore it has to be redone…This where the urge to revisit Women In Me came from. Ironically, at the end of the last performance in June last year, I made a secret vow to myself to Never Ever perform – This Piece? In This Theatre? Conventional Dance? – again…Despite gaining good reviews, I just couldn’t handle this nightmare. I hated it. And it left me with a deep sour taste in my mouth. What enraged me the most about this piece is that it felt totally wasted from start to finish. It didn’t feel like me at all but then it didn’t feel it was given proper love, care and thought. What stood out – and probably saved it in my eyes – was my “sharp burlesque” moves to quote directly from one of the reviews. It was a real shame.

Does Women In Me deserve to be restage? Nope. It deserved to be faced as a real challenge. Something I avoided at the time. Knowingly or not, I wasn’t prepared to rekindle with my femininity nor to explore it and so making some attempts through dance to reconnect with female sensibility didn’t really register until I hit the stage on the opening night. Funny enough, that was my idea – the theme, the structure, the will to reconnect with my feminity, the choice of songs exclusively from female artists, everything about this piece was my idea and by default (but also deliberately) it was a very personal piece of work. Except that it didn’t go as deep as it was meant to be. In fact it barely scratched the surface and opened the gate to misinterpretations of what the piece was about and of my personal journey both as a performer and an indivudual. As a man in search with his inner identity. Given the wrong hints – the “drag” clothes, the progressive strip-tease culminating with a full frontal, the majority of the audience took away with them the impression (cont)

The Missing Link

Nearly 3 years has passed since I started this blog. Initially I was meant to write about Body Talks, a performance piece which was looking at age and the male body. I wasn’t sure of how I’d run the blog when I started it and I ended up, after the 1st 2 posts, disregarding it. Looking back at it, it was bound to happen: I was struggling with Body Talks, not really motivated with the piece, I was under pressure as time was running out quickly and I had no idea of what – and how – I wanted to document about the piece and its making. Body Talks did happen. We had 3 dates at the end of March 2010 at The Albany. Despite the extremely short period of time I had left to get the piece together – literally a day and a half – it went well overall. But it left me a bit drained and I could already feel the first cracks in my committment to my practice. As we went from Spring 2010 to Summer 2011, the cracks became holes and the holes became issues; step by step these issues took over my creativity & my lucidity when it came to make work. Or shall I say when it came to want to make new work. Fastrack just over a year, in Fall 2012, here I am trying to transit smoothly from a period of hiatus to the return to my pratice.

Initially the hiatus was thought to be definite. I wasn’t enjoying what I was doing anymore and I felt completely burnt out. However, without really looking for them, I found myself involved in several performance projects during that period and being prolific with my writing. It’s nice to see that I hadn’t lost touch with the arts but it wasn’t enough to convince me to have another go at it. Perhaps it was much easier that way; as I was still jogging down ideas of performances in my notebook I didn’t want to face the facts – that I was being creative more than ever – and so preferred to pretend that it was nothing significant, that it was no indication that I was ready to come back to my practice. Then my film project, A Cryptic Assumption, came along and that’s it! I was completely hooked again!

So today feels like a new begining for my practice, a new chapter in my artistic journey, a rebirth for this almost forgotten blog. Its rebirth wasn’t mant to be actually; as my brain was going overdrive thinking about all the different aspects of research I could start the new project from, using this blog made sense. With no second thoughts. I decided to focus, for the time being, exclusively on the exploration of the body and what a better way to go on an artistic expedition than recycling some old work and giving it a new lease of life. Body Talks, as it stands, get a second chance to breathe, having morphed into a blog that will, hopefully, retrace various stages, moments and elements of research on the new project. The new project is an attempt to reconcile myself with my last production and its failures. It’s not a case of re-invention nor a case of reconstruction, it is simply a case of re-interpretation.