Hello Hello!
Sorry I’ve not blogged for a couple of days – I think living at Bank Street tired me out a lot more than I expected, and as consequence, of late, mostly I’ve been sleeping. I fell asleep half way through a chat with my mum yesterday, it was a mess.
I think the best thing to do with this blog would be to let you know about a couple of moments of performance I’m going to be working on over the next fortnight, and also to tell you the other things I’ve got planned to think about. I’m also going to be doing a blog about my little performance night, ‘Saturday Night Live’ soon. It’s very much a baby, so I need to think about it a little bit more and feed it up with brain milk (ew) before I tell you more about it. But it’s going to be EXCITING and FUN and I can’t wait to share all the information about it with you.
Before anything else though, I really want to thank everybody that came down to see me over the three, four days I was existing at Bank Street, and my lovely lovely friends coming bearing cards and wine and food and their cars and duvets and cameras and batteries and lighting solutions, and telling me their stories and being an incredible soundboard to various ideas – some terrible, some possibly the beginnings of a piece! It was very daunting putting the first stages of a work in progress out there to people, and everyone was very warm, and supportive and lovely, and I appreciate it a lot. So yeh. Love and ting. I also really want to thank the amazing staff at Bank Street, who are really encouraging and wonderful, and kept the building toasty warm and well stocked in both tea and coffee all the time that I was there. It was very easy to feel comfortable and at home, and to settle into the building’s gentle daily routine.
So this week, the big event is thinking about the concept of the piece and really strengthening it. Another resident at Bank Street, James Price, once did a piece of performance which simply consisted of a set of rules, in itself a really interesting stance on audience relations. So I’m going to be playing with that this week, so that when I’m doing the piece, which is going to be about 7 hours long, there’s a really strong sense within my own head of what I can and cannot do, and why I’m doing it. Blah. I’m then going to put together a little concept ‘thingy’ and send it to a few other artists, some people that I just respect, and some lovely people that are going to help me with getting the piece shaped into a script. I forget, a lot, that Bank Street is all about support, and that there’s lots of mentoring available for me – this is a lovely example of it.
More excitingly, I’ve got some little moments of performance I’m going to be thinking about over the next few weeks – the use of the internet in my piece, of press conferences of the different, compartmentalised aspects of your personality; I’m looking at a Barker-inspired (The Castle) idea of carrying a corpse around with you, tied to your back; I’m going to be sending some emails about ideas for COSTUME (the only reason anyone wants to work in performance) and I’m going to be playing about with telephones, and with the structure of a working day.
LOADS OF STUFF.
Right. I’m going to get back on my exercise bike now. I want to detox a bit, but I don’t want to stop drinking alcohol or caffeine, so I’m going to just exercise everyday and eat more lentils and drink loads of water.
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