Lula, I like how you start on the street, looking at the flier. That is how my performance starts for most people. A performance isn’t just what happens within the theater. The seeing the fliers and the dynamic reactions that causes are the only aspect of the work most people touch. This aspect can last literally for decades! People actually collect our fliers! The fliers set off processes in some people. After years of seeing the fliers, they come to a performance.
As an example of the fliering aspect, Alexi and Corey last night did the fliering in Berkeley for tomorrow’s Oakland performance. Today…
“Here we packed up for the day, loaded up the truck, and were soon on the road ... since the route to work went down Sacramento to Alcatraz, we got to see all of our fliering work fresh first thing in the morning ... and all the people checking them out! It was like every corner there was another person standing at the crosswalk, waiting for the light to change, and standing reading the flier! Fun and satisfying! Would there be someone at the next corner ...? Yes, there she is, reading the flier!”
In more non- linear paths, seeing our multi- color cars around town, walking past our houses, etc are all parts of the performance process [not to mention our public access show and LUVER]. All that comes together in the performance space.
This is also true for the reputation and myth that grows up around the work, etc. What is a sex cult? … or a leader of one? These images which grow lazily outside of the work, the artist cannot control or even live up to. If you are lucky, you can play with these expectations to explode them.
I like how you included our meeting up magically on FACEBOOK. We both were actively available, which is how magic works!
Most of my work is private performance like we did in the studio. I always wonder about guys who say “I like your tits “! Do they ever wonder why they don’t have what they think they want? I am after intimacy, closeness, going deep within aroused pleasure outside the narrow funnels with whole people [not just tits]. Don’t get me wrong… I liked rubbing your tits against my face. But I am going for more! And people feel that. So that opens things up.
Anyway, having a good title makes a performance much easier. That was why I was impressed by your title, “Prove You’re Not a Robot: Interactive Experiments in Fear-Art-Love.” Also having a “plant” who is open, eager and willing and who is prepared for the nudity and being erotic opens things up for everybody in a different way than the people like Linda and Erika [your Emilie] who have been with me for years. Your willingness changed things even before you did anything. When you acted from the willingness, it amplified the effect.
Btw, you were the only plant there. Katie from Omaha was just there. Of course, there is no way for you to know the true arrangement [unless you planted her there yourself!]. I did not even have to use my favorite line to fuzz reality up. The line is “BUT I MAY BE LYING!”
I didn’t use the word Eroplay at the performance, although the play in the performance happened to be Eroplay. You must have read ART OF THE SHAMAN which I wrote in the early nineties. Eroplay was the first physical [tanpanic] trance I “discovered.” Since then, I have discovered different tanpanic trances, etc. and different states of pleasure arousing states. I have included these in my work, especially as a response to the increasingly repressive trends in the society in the last twenty years. We were just getting to these tanpanic trances Saturday when we ran out of time.
Again the key to things getting so deep so fast was the people taking personal responsibility for doing it, for saying YES, for playing together outside of the normal boxes. It was not social, casual. It was extremely focused fun. If you wanted to “fuck” after it, it would have meant that the performance experience had been quickly absorbed back into the everyday level. But how you felt was still in the altered reality, which is really the core reality. In the mid- nineties I had to change the whole performance structure because people had absorbed it into the everyday level by making it into a pick-up scene… No magic, risk, or human connection.
There is more to say, but I will stop by saying our job as artists is always go to rocking town with abandon!
In Freedom,
Frank Moore
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