Areas of Unrest

9 June 1999 - Less Experimental

All of that last entry was an attempt to capture something of what Scott Kelman's workshop was like. It sounds entirely insane and, actually, I couldn't even write about some of the exercises which look more insane. I could write about them in words and describe what we did, but it wouldn't tell you much about how it all felt. The manic riffing (his word) of the last entry has more of the feel to me.

Anyway, it was fun to try writing something experimental like that. I did the riffs out loud, actually, then transcribed them. But that is similar to my normal process and probably relates to having my auditory sense being my dominant one. I don't know how to improvise silently.

I was actually rather self-concious about parts of the workshop and I realized how much more comfortable I am about the words than about the movement, though riffing actually has to do with whole body movement and isn't just talking. I'm not sure if any of this helps in terms of the sort of performing I do, but I've been wanting to play more with techniques so I swallowed my discomfort about all the new-age stuff the processes are wrapped in. I'm fairly sure he could tell I (and one other person out of the seven of us) felt self-concious and he talked about self-conciousness being okay as it is a step to conciousness. That was a bit too new-age for me but it was reassuring anyway.

I expect I will do various experimental bits here from time to time in the future, but I expect that they won't be very frequent. As it is, writing more than just weekly entries is an experiment.

Now if I could just turn some of that creative mania into doing some of the stuff I actually have to do, like household paperwork and finishing this white paper I am writing at work and catching up on the mail and making assorted travel plans and any of the 312 projects on my grand list of things to do. On the plus side, I did do half of my laundry tonight and last week I took a sampler to the framers, which is a particular accomplishment because it's a sampler that I finished stitching over twenty-five years ago.