WORKZ

I'm starting a workshop with Tahni Holt tomorrow that I am very excited about. Former classmates and teachers of mine will be in it, as well as people whose work I have admired from afar. Exciting! Tahni sent us these ten statements her friend Alice Chauchat wrote that she often returns to when thinking about performance and performance making. I like:

1. A work is not about its author. It is not about something. It is something.

2. Mental activity is a dance. A particular thought process is a choreography, and produces a dance.

3. Don't represent ideas, provoke ideas. Whatever ideas led you to do something, a piece is not there for the audience to understand your ideas.

4. Ideas are all types of experience which possibly can be reflected upon.

5. The coherence of a work is not dependant on a direct relationship between process and product. Coherence is produced by a constant oscillation between the doing of a thing and the observation of this doing.

6. There is not one way to justify decisions. The particularity of decision-making is part of the work's identity.

7. Each work demands a new definition of dramaturgy and defines itself through it.

8. Each work demands and defines itself through its own methodology.

9. Codes and conventions pre-exist work. But work also creates codes and conventions.

10. Be your own audience. Focus on what you want to do / show rather than on what you think others want you to do.

Also, I wish I could have been there for this: