A very busy period of activity has ended. The comedy course took up 6 weeks of Monday nights, but also a lot of rehearsal and writing an rewriting of material. It has been a success though. We all had our debut at ‘Up the Creek’ and all gave their best and there was laughing, and not just from our invited friends. The hula hooping not only added and extra dimension of opposition to joke telling, but gave birth to some material as well. I hope to do some open mic spots soon. I am excited about approaching performance in exsisting cultural systems and spaces.
The dust has settled on the stand-up course, but the marathon and jography training still carries on. I had to abandon any attempt at running on Saturday and read a book instead as my back hurt like blazes on Friday. But on Sunday my longest Fartlek session so far on hilly Streatham Common was great. Helped a lot by the spring sunshine, I must admit. Sticking at running whilst tired will help on the day and help me to be tenacious with things creative.
Today I am contemplating my 45 minute jog route with a view to some modification into a star shape. next time I will try this out.
I have the go ahead to organise a pilot residency for Epsom common this summer with a view to a full scale operation in 2013. This is great news and hopefully there will be a chance for an artist to do the same every year after that.
I have introduced hula hooping into my standup act that I have been working on for 6 weeks. This was quite hard as I have just used comedy material alone so far, and not even mentioned the hula hooping. It went down well with my fellow standups, which is good as they, like a perspective audience, will not have seen that before. Delivering the material and hula hooping at the same time is difficult, but that is the whole point of my practice. And unifying the comedy and the performance side of art is good, approaching from another direction.
On the ‘Jography’ front the mapping of my runs with the iPhone app goes well, today I tried circles and a spiral. This all helped me to keep going on tired legs, and amused the dog walkers on Tooting Bec common.
I am starting negotiations with Surrey County Council about a residency on Epsom common. This would be a dream come true as I love roaming over its wild terrain. I feel as if there is nothing between me and the environment when I am alone there.
I have been rather distracted by the stand up comedy course which I am doing. The need to be funny and the attraction of humour have always been strong for me and writing material that is funny for as many people as possible is very different from making art. The audience are often quiet an art performance, but in stand up, unless you are happy to die on stage, silence is not a great sound. This is interesting, approaching creativity from the base of audiences expectations, instead of ones own spontaneous process.
My training for the marathon goes well although I am having to do a lot of it on my own as it does not always fit with my club running nights on Tuesday and Thursday. The lack of intergration is resulting in less injury as I don’t push myself so hard when I train alone.
One of my new routines is to do a fartlek session on the common. This is literally fast/play so you make it up as you go, sprinting between trees or for longer distances then jogging till you recover. Experimenting with an app called Imapmyrun to plot the routes I take, has shown that it will be useful for Jography. It will get the residue of the performance on to the net.
