“Untitled (forever)”

Without declaring a discrete beginning to my performance, I began by placing a box of supplies and a change of clothes next the window. I changed from my ‘regular’ clothes into a short black dress, opaque black tights and black high heels. I sat on the ground and began unpacking my materials, laying them out in front of me very methodically. Included was a set of sewing needles, sewing thread, scissors, matches, a washcloth, a bottle of water, a pencil, tape and some black india ink. I began lashing a sewing needle the pencil using the thread, wrapping it very tight and securing it with a piece of string. I lit a match and briefly held the needle in the flame. Next, I opened up the india ink and the bottle of water. I poured a little bit of ink in the cap, and dampened the washcloth slightly.

I pulled up a section of my tights just above my left knee and cut a hole about two inches wide. I dipped the pencil in the ink, and began sticking the needle into my skin. Each poke created a tiny dot which I ordered into the shape of the infinity sign. I had to go over this shape probably six or seven times to create a solid line, wiping off excess ink with the damp washcloth in after each iteration. When I was satisfied with my work, I packed my equipment back up, and changed back into my regular clothes and took a seat.

Though there was no specific narrative to the ‘story’ I chose to perform, it followed a definite course of rising and falling action, a character, setting and transformation. However, though I made myself into a ‘different person’ for the duration of the piece, the actions I performed resulted in a permanent change to my own body.

“Sleepover/dark arts”

Before our class began, I set up a table in the middle of the room with blue sheets hanging off of the edges. On the table were some candles, incense, pine needles and pine cones and a spilled glass of water. Some drops of blood were in this glass of water and lots of the items were also spilled on the floor. My friend Katie and I wore yellow nightgowns and laid under the table, partly obscured by the blue sheets. We both had slightly bloody noses. We laid under the table asleep for five minutes after the class begun until an alarm went off. We woke each other up, got out from under the table and cleaned the blood off of each other’s noses and began cleaning up the table and spilled water.

The structure of this performance stresses the aftermath over the action. Only evidence of what may have happened was observed, and the resolution is all that the audience witnesses. It is ambiguous whether Katie and I participated in some kind of illicit, violent, supernatural or sexual activity during the night.

“The other half of the day”

I began recording my dreams every night in detail. I determined before class how many dreams I was going to recount, and randomly determined what times I would tell them over the course of class. I did this first during Devin’s reading performance and also the two following classes. While I retold the dreams to the best of my ability, I performed some kind of very slow physical movement with my eyes closed. Sometimes these movements corresponded in some way with what I was describing and sometimes they were more related to the difficulty and cloudiness associated with trying to remember dreams. I tried to get other classmates to participate as well and Corinne retold a few dreams during one class. I stopped when I stopped being able to remember my dreams very well.

I did this both as a performance and also as a personal exercise in organizing my night time thoughts. It became frustrating to me at some point that the experiences I was having in my dreams every night were not valuable during waking life. Performing these dreams to the class became a way to balance the worthlessness of nighttime. I was truly amazed by the frequency of certain topics; Providence, finding drugs on the ground and a boy I barely know from Providence came up almost every other night. It was almost indulgent to talk about these sorts things so much, and I realized that maybe I would like to pursue these topics in following performances. I had never done anything so directly personal in my creative work before, and figured that now was a good time to test the waters.

“Is it you, or me looking at you,”

I set up two chairs facing each other next to a table on which I laid out lipstick, eyeliner, eye shadow and mascara. I sat Devin in one chair, and sat in the other, and leaned in very close to his face and began applying make up and fixing my hair as though I was looking into a mirror. I started whispering/soft speaking statements to Devin, which he would repeat back to me in a normal speaking voice. The content of these statements progressed from questioning the properties of the ‘mirror’ I was looking at to reflections on the differences between two males that I had recently been attracted to. These statements often brought up issues of identity and communication, specifically the question of self and the line between someone else, and the ideas that we project onto them.

“Heavy research”

I laid out a large piece of plastic on the floor and secured it to the ground, and asked for a volunteer from out class. Corinne decided she would do it, and I instructed her to choose some position on the plastic, whatever felt most comfortable for her. I told her that I was going to ask some questions in a very methodical manner, and began with simple questions about her background and progressed to more personal questions, and sometimes questions about myself. I recorded her responses on the piece of plastic and made associations between her spoken words and physical movements as though I was trying to develop some kind of precise way to measure all of her behaviors. I often drew connections between things she said that were entirely illogical, making associations between unrelated statements based on physical movements or ideas I developed independently.

Whereas the previous performance explored the balance between two way communication and self-projection, “Heavy research” is very focused on the very one way examination that is sometimes performed on subjects of interest. In cases of infatuation, the tiniest physical movements become matters of great importance as they relate to body language. Whatever communication that occurs is recalled again and again in the mind of the observer, often drawing many connections between information in an effort to understand more about the subject. This reconstruction of the subject becomes more present in the mind of the observer than the subject itself, bringing back the original question asked in “Is it you, or me looking at you.”