Yes, it lived up to the hype! THANK YOU artists for sharing your work! For those of you who did not attend, you missed performances by:
Silvie Jensen
Melissa Shaw
Meghann Snow
Tom Swirly
Quinn Hechtkopff and Anne Bassen
Damien Quinones
Emily James
and (they showed up on their way to another gig and delivered one hell of a performance)
Paul Pinto, Gelsey Bell, and Andrew Livingston.
It was all pretty hot and everyone got the neurons swimming, like poked tadpoles. I assume neurons swim, doesn’t everything?
One of the most interesting things about the PERFORMANCY FORUMS (now that we have had four this is more apparent) is how flexible they are in terms of tone and mood, both as a whole, and internally throughout the evening. I think this flexibility is partly due to the forum’s mix of amateur performers with professionals, one moment the audience members are squirming with a certain open-mic discomfort while others applaud wildly, the next moment the same people enthralled by something wholly powerful, but others feel the former way, and so on. As a curator, there isn’t a whole lot I can do about this, with subjectivity considered, etc etc, but I’m not sure it’s a bad thing. Performance is a delicate medium, and it needs a lot of breathing room and then a lot of formal consideration.
My questions for continuing the PF include:
1.) how can the performances/performers interact with one another, not necessarily in terms of participation but in terms of flow, tone, mood, and overall dramaturgy? Should we have themes or central concepts for each PF?
2.) how can “quality” be removed from the experiential equation? What is quality and how should be speak about it in this context? Does everyone have the “right” to perform?
3.) how can the artists be given a concrete reaction to their work? Do we even really want this? How about feedback forms?
Artists who have participated, or others who hold forums/salons, do you have ideas about any of this?
Nociception Theatrician 