Wow, long time since I posted, I know. I meant to post after the 16th, honest. Only I became quite unwell and was bed ridden for a couple of days. Had to recover, and it took a while. When I was ill the last thing I wanted to do was stare at a computer screen.
Anyways, enough said. On Thursday 16th I met my mentor Sylvia Rimat for the first time in sunny Brighton. I then spent the next two hours with her talking about our practices and the questions I had put to her in the email. The responses I received were to be expected, I was enlightened to hear that my path though stemming from a different discipline, turned out to be very similar otherwise in terms of money and funding. It was therefore rewarding to know that if I pursue the route I am going down successfully I will have a sustainable practice one day. She also showed me the funding application for I Guess if the Stage Exploded… which was of course successful. Interestingly it had quite an informal anecdotal tone in places but what held my attention most was genuine written support from producers and curators. On pointing this out Sylvia then showed me a personal typed letter, which would be sent along with the body of the application.
We then talked about some of my work. Despite friends and colleagues supporting my work at exhibitions and for event evenings, I couldn’t help but wince at some of my recent performances. Lack of rehearsal time shows, but what came out of that was my use of props and popcorn to enliven the pieces and take them away from the I-am-the-performer-standing-in-font-of-the-audience model of thinking.
Leaving quite an intense 2 hour session (it could have been days in The Basement) of talking I began my place as the sickly child for the greater part of the next week. When I came out of brain-soup mode and desired once again to bare my senses to performance (risky, yes) I went to Camden Art Centre’s event tied with the Bruce Lacey show. Waiting for a friend, I hesitantly found myself sitting at the front next to a girl in a red top. Sending advance apologies to my friend as seats disappeared to quickly for me to spare any, I found out that I was sitting next to Emma Bennett: the evenings final performer. I didn’t reveal that I had seen her website, loved her work and that she had been a ‘suggested’ artist alongside Sylvia for the current project. The whole event was great, it is a secret shame that I rarely get the chance to see much performance because of where I am based. What I liked about Emma’s work however was its perceived simplicity, it’s fragmented yet confident delivery. Emma’s practice deals with language and this performance was no exception, rendering a Dylan Thomas? poem into consonant stutters, delayed trips and poignant streams of barely coherent verbiage.
Finishing the week with a couple of up-to-the-minute application deadlines I received the news that I have been invited to the panel presentation stage for the NSA scheme. The clincher. This goes through or no money. It is in October and I have begun to research in earnest: poetry, performance, anything, everything. And I have a performance again in just under 2 weeks: rushed? yes. How can I break this? How can I become calmly confident?
