immediacy, artistic shapeshifting, and documentation...

I used to film every single gig I performed. I told myself this was the only way I was going to learn anything, direct myself, be objective. The problem was, it became an obsession. I didn’t know how a gig went until I was home after, watching back the video on my computer screen.

The problem with documenting is, the documentation begins to supercede the reality. The documentation is the memory. Sometimes when I look at pictures from my childhood I think, do I really remember this? Is this static image the only memory? The mind plays tricks when we let it, when we want it, when its nicer to think we remember than to admit we forget.

When other performers asked me to film their performances for them, sometimes I would feel a need to tell them this: That the truth of a moment has many sides. The truth is somewhere between how you felt at that moment performing, and what you see afterwards on the screen.

I left the medium of film for theatre. It’s a comical chain of events, because a long time ago, I left the medium of theatre for film. I thought, I don’t want to work in an art form that only occurs in a moment, seen once or twice. I wanted to create visual stories that could be seen again and again, captured for all time.

I remember I used to always say, a film is forever, even a silly little short can be programmed at some odd hour, on some strange channel on the other side of the world in ten years time. A live performance, when it finishes a run, dies.

So why did I change my mind?

I now work in a form that is intimate and immediate, temporary. I write a piece, and I need no one but myself to complete it.

I can rehearse it and perform it within days or weeks of writing it, If I don’t like it, If it doesn’t work the way I initially intended, I can easily scrap it and start it again.

If you are with me in that audience, if I engage with you, and you connect with me, you may not remember my words in months that follow, but you will remember a feeling, you will remember my presence. And if I have done what have set out for, hopefully, I will have imbued that instant with a total passion for that moment. Why did this matter to me so much,? Well maybe because outside of performing, I had begun to find being present in a moment much more of a test..

At any rate, I am no longer obsessed with filming my performances, What matters more is how I feel the moment I start and finish a set, my pauses and the sensation of my breaths..