Light and shadow is resonating with me. What you see and what you don’t see. There are parts hidden, always; Andre Zachary mentioned this Monday. During our portrait study we shared details about people in the class that were chosen or curated creating a lens the audience would see through. Each person’s world is curated by themselves. Facebook and Instagram profiles are curated to project a certain persona. The news is curated. I curate my children’s world as much as I can. I curate my work, my blog, my fashion (if you can call it that), my food. Choices are the curation of life. Ideas of protection, mediation, filtering and triangulation come up for me when thinking about a curated life, either the life you curate for yourself or the life someone else’s perspective has curated of your life.

My intermedia lab group ended up creating our Portrait Project with me at the center. There were ideas of interviews, auditions, interrogations and being put in situations where I was told my truths were being questioned. The social experiment of it was interesting to me. My team mates were to ask questions of me that I didn’t know before hand so I would have to really think about the answer and upon answering the question they would say, “Interesting,” in a way akin to an interrogation. The fascinating part was even though I knew they meant no ill will and we had set the project up like this I questioned my answers. Which is absurd because there was no reason the truth of the answers could be questioned.

[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dy5wAtbbP30]

The conceptual and social commentary in our Viewings spark some particular feelings right now. Jerome Bel’s “Veronique,” Antonia Baehr’s “LAUGH”, Amara Tabor Smith’s “House/Full” and Michelle Ellsworth’s “The Rehearsal Artist,” along with Andre Zachary’s examples of process in Monday’s class and our subsequent discussions of mapping/notation with him in Laban today. These all create a web of discourse linking the viewer to the artist in different ways. I’m interested in the word “affect” right now as well and I think there is something of that in here. Zachary links his dancers through his new dissection of language through process. Ellsworth, Bel and Baehr are linking the audience, performer and artist by prompting the viewer to question what is happening and why it’s happening. Smith is linking her work with different areas of Oakland giving it a sense of place and mapping automatically linking it to people watching but also the communities in those places.

Process can be concept. Process is full of context. Process can be performance. The behind the scenes is often more interesting to me than the performance, but in these works they have weaved process into the performance. The process is happening as it unfolds, the audience is processing and will continue to process after. The artists are saying something. Speaking out is resonating with me right now and these choreographers did that in a way that speaks on many levels, in many different contexts and cross culturally. What are you going to say and what makes this the moment you are going to say it? These choreographers are speaking out, sometimes more subtly than others, but even if you don’t get it immediately, you can feel it.